"The recurrent banking panics of the 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s are widely viewed as failures of our economic system. A simple version of Samuelson's overlapping generations model is used to generate such failures of Walrasian equilibrium. The spontaneous "panics"...

This paper develops a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model to study how the instability of the banking sector can amplify and propagate business cycles. The model builds on Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (BGG) (1999), who consider credit demand friction due to agency cost, but it...