Professor Alan Ahearne:

The surprising thing about the economics profession, particularly the academic economics profession, is that banking sectors essentially got dropped out of economic models in the 1980s and through the 1990s. Most graduates getting PhDs in economics would have worked with extremely complicated models on computers, and they look very sophisticated, but they would not have had a banking sector. There was no credit in those models. They started to develop some models with money in them but not credit. So the profession went down a certain path in which credit, certainly for advanced economies, was completely ignored. So it does not surprise me, in a way, that economists here, working with the models and the techniques they were working with, would not have paid enough attention to a banking sector.