Macro Musings with David Beckworth · Monday, July 13, 2026
Stefan Luck argued that to understand contemporary financial phenomena like bank runs, researchers must often turn to historical data, particularly in instances where modern government interventions obscure causal relationships. He noted that studying periods without such interventions provides valuable insights.
“So if you're looking at the contemporary banking sector, and you're concluding that bank runs never happen, you know, then of course, you immediately interject, well, that's just because the government is providing deposit insurance, is doing lending of last resort activities, and all kinds of other interventions to prevent those things from happening.”
“Now you have two options what to do. You can write a model, or you can actually go back in history and study those laboratories in which the government was not doing these kind of interventions.”
“And this kind of logic of how you can use historical micro data applies to a lot of more different questions. Just think of hyperinflation. There is just not that many hyperinflations in modern history. So we naturally sometimes have to go back in history to study them.”