In Between Debt and the Devil, Adair Turner writes (p. 61),

Textbook descriptions of banks usually assume that they lend money to businesses to finance new capital investment…But in most modern banking systems most credit does not finance new capital investment. Instead, it funds the purchase of assets that already exist and above all, existing real estate.

…Different categories of credit perform different economic functions and have different consequences. Only when credit is used to finance useful new capital investment does it generate the additional income flows required to make the debt certainly sustainable. Contrary to the pre-crisis orthodoxy that the quantity of credit created and its allocation between different uses should be left to free market forces, banks left to themselves will produce too much of the wrong sort of debt.

What is good about the book is that he invites us to examine how credit is created and where it goes. As he points out, standard macro models have totally ignored this issue.

What is bad about the book is embedded in the last sentence quoted above. We are left to assume that the huge allocation of credit toward housing was the operation of “free market forces.” I do not know about other countries, but for the United States this is totally false. The government was very much involved in channeling credit, and it channeled as much as it could toward housing finance.

Still, I think that what is good about the book makes it worth reading. I plan to say more when I have finished it.