David Frisby

I remember having a conversation with a dear friend of mine who died a couple of years ago David Frisby who was the translator of Simmel's Philosophy of Money. And he was a colleague of mine at LSE and he came to get me for lunch one day and I was reading I think some book about banking. I said something to him about what I was reading and he said look your book is about money, remember that it is not about banking and I have been thinking about that. And gradually dawning on me that actually he was right that what we have been witnessing in 2007, 2008, 2009 was a financial crisis and it was a crisis of the financial system. And it wasn't the same at all as a crisis of money. Money was something more general and more specific. It is a currency, it circulates among people, it's not reducible to the banking system. It's not the same as finance. So there are all kinds of ways in which you want to draw out the distinction.