Really? First thing I hear. Can you point me at more information?
Essentially, the political instability of the Roman Empire causes the financial instability.
Check this out (Tiberias handling debt crisis of 33AD ) as for the early competence Points to relatively well developed understanding of banking and the economy:
https://www.globalfinancialdata.com/gfdblog/?p=1374
Peter Temin's Book: The Roman Market Economy is a good source
ttps://press.princeton.edu/titles/9896.html
Mark Koyama, covers the topic of the decline of Roman banking expertise well on this
Macro Musings podcast. I included a quote from his review of the above book to showcase banking complexity:
Financial markets, in particular, reached a comparatively high level of development in the
Roman Empire. All sophisticated pre-industrial commercial economies ran on credit due to the
costs associated with transporting bullion. Rome was no exception. Most loans were no doubt
small-scale and informal, and most financial relationships personal. But Temin demonstrates
that there was a market for loanable funds in ancient Rome. There were limits on the legal
rates of interest, but market rates fluctuated below the legal maximum in response to the
scarcity or abundance of money. Long-term partnerships, or societates, were used to fund larger
ventures. Banks were prominent in financial intermediation, pooling capital and channelling
idle funds into productive investment"
This article talks about the Roman banking system some some:
https://www.ancient.eu/article/974/banking-in-the-roman-world/
Rome also has a relatively well developed insurance market at this time also, driven by the need to insure ships carrying grain and other goods.
Economic understanding, at least during the time of Tiberius, was relatively advanced but seems to have declined as military generals turned Emperors overcentralize power and debased currency.
There's an argument to be had here, because the centralization was nescesary, but the decline of civil banking institutions under Diocletian don't point towards his understanding of economics well.
While the long term issues leading to the collapse of Rome are essentially solidified with the lack of political and economic reform during the republic period, knowledge of how to deal with economic issues survived for a while, at least until the Year of 5 Emperors and the rapid expansion of military alongside a lack of ability to pay for its expansion.
Essentially, starting with Severan dynasty up until the time of Diocletian and his
price edicts, we can already see a decline in knowledge of economic theory driven by the trend of debasing currency to raise funds to pay off the military to succeed as the next Emperor. While Diocletian politically reforms the state, he does so in a way that aids its economic destruction.
Diocletian's mass minting of coins of low metallic value continued to increase inflation, and the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low. Merchants either stopped producing goods, sold their goods illegally, or used barter. The Edict tended to disrupt trade and commerce, especially among merchants. It is safe to assume that a gray market economy evolved out of the edict at least between merchants.Sometimes entire towns could no longer afford to produce trade goods. Because the Edict also set limits on wages, those who had fixed salaries (especially soldiers) found that their money was increasingly worthless as the artificial prices did not reflect actual costs.
and:
Banks were the canaries in the Roman market economy, and they disappeared
in the course of the third century. Argentarii had little reason to puzzle out the
difference between real and nominal interest rates before 200; they apparently were
unable to do so fast enough to survive. Diocletian’s Price Edict (Lewis and Reinhold,
1990, volume 2, pp. 422–426), one of several attempts to stem the inflation, reveals
that many markets still were operating around 300 CE, but taxes in kind multiplied,
and command economies grew. By the time of the Dark Ages in about the fifth
century CE, there were still markets, but no longer a market economy. Roman
agricultural technology and city planning were abandoned, education decreased,
and long-distance trade in bulk commodities vanished. The Pax Romana ended, and
Roman law was forgotten in Europe for close to a millennium.
The top is just from wikipedia, and the bottom is from Temin's book.
Of course, the mass outbreaks of disease don't particularly help the situation, and could have alone crippled the empire.
You really need to fix the politics to fix the empire.