Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast, where you'll weekly guide to the numbers

in the news and in life. I'm Charlotte McDonald.

It's that time of year again. The winners of this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

have been announced. And this year, one of them is about as famous as you can be outside

economic circles. Ben Bernanke, he steered the US Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, through

the financial crisis that hit hard in 2008. Financial markets around the world are in shock

as another big bank collapses. Lehman Brothers, America's fourth largest investment bank,

goes bankrupt. Today on the show, we're going to talk about all three winners of this year's

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, Ben Bernanke and two fellow US academics, Douglas Diamond

and Philip Dibbick, looking at their work on explaining the role of banks in the financial

system. And why banks could be susceptible to financial panics? We've invited our top

expert onto the show to explain all author and F.T. columnist Tim Halford. Charlotte, you're

inviting me onto my own show, but thank you. You're welcome Tim. Okay, so why did they win?

And why was it exciting? It's exciting partly because Ben Bernanke is already incredibly famous.

I mean, he must be one of very few people to win a Nobel Prize and he's bigger than the Nobel

itself. So that's attracted a lot of attention because Ben Bernanke, of course, was running the US

Federal Reserve during the great financial crisis of 2008. Ben Bernanke and Diamond and Dibbick

were really showing why banks matter. Why banks have been underrated by economists in the past.

And also why banks seem to be so fragile, whether it seemed to be at the heart of so many economic crises.

And so did they work together or did they work separately? The work was done in parallel really.

The significant academic papers were published in 1983 and there were two papers. Ben

Bernanke's paper and Diamond and Dibbick's paper. And they were aware of each other's work and

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