Misunderstanding Financial Crises

Product Description

Prior to the financial crisis of 2007-2008 economists thought that no such crisis could or would ever happen again in the United States that financial events of such magnitude were a thing of the distant past. In fact observers of that distant past--the period from the half century prior to the Civil War up to the passage of deposit insurance during the Great Depression which was marked by repeated financial crises--note that while legislation immediately after crises reacted to their effects economists & policymakers continually failed to grasp the true lessons to be learned. Gary Gorton considered by many to be the authority on the financial crisis of our time holds that economists fundamentally misunderstand financial crises--what they are why they occur & why there were none in the U.S. between 1934 & 2007. In Misunderstanding Financial Crises he illustrates that financial crises are inherent to the production of bank debt which is used to conduct transactions & that unless the government designs intelligent regulation crises will continue. Economists he writes looked from a certain point of view & missed everything that was important: the evolution of capital markets & the banking system the existence of new financial instruments & the size of certain money markets like the sale & repurchase market. Delving into how such a massive intellectual failure could have happened Gorton offers a back-to-basics elucidation of financial crises & shows how they are not rare idiosyncratic unfortunate events caused by a coincidence of unconnected factors. By looking back to the " from 1934 to 2007 when there were no systemic crises & to the " he brings together such issues as bank debt & liquidity credit booms & manias & moral hazard & too-big-too-fail to illustrate the costs of bank failure & the true causes of financial crises. He argues that the successful regulation that prevented crises did not adequately keep pace with innovation in the financial sector due in large part to economists misunderstandings. He then looks forward to offer both a better way for economists to conceive of markets as well as a description of the regulation necessary to address the historical threat of financial crises."