This underlines the need to improve our understanding of where the economy and finance meet during stable times and how crises erupt:  1  Many important breakthroughs in our understanding of the role of financial market imperfections on the real economy are rooted in the work of Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Spence and George Akerlof, who were awarded the 2001 Bank of Sweden Nobel Prize in economics for their 1970s analysis of markets with asymmetric information.
Bernanke and Gertler (1989) later formalized these financial market imperfections in a macroeconomic model to improve our understanding of the Great Depression. This is often referred to by economists as the financial accelerator model. See Bernanke (2007a) for a summary of the financial accelerator and the credit channel.