Why the Conventional Wisdom about the 2008 Financial Crisis Is Still Wrong: Ten Years Later

摘要

The idea of writing a retrospective account of the financial crisis ten years out is a good one, and Paul Mueller's book provides a nice overview of the economic and political factors that contributed to the crisis. Ten Years Later: Why the Conventional Wisdom about the 2008 Financial Crisis Is Still Wrong has a bit of a public-choice flavor in that he stresses how various bank and mortgage regulations tended to amplify the crisis-making it worse than it would otherwise have been. That perspective is perhaps naturally absent from the macroeconomic perspective that dominates writing and economic research in this area, in which the details of policies are essentially without interest and the focus tends to be on variables of interest to macroeconomists as explanatory factors. For the most part, most macroeconomists regard their models to be correct, even though the models completely missed-that is, failed to forecast-the financial crisis that emerged in 2007-8. As a macro-economist might say with a shrug, "Surprises and shocks happen." Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff s work on financial crises (This Time Is Different [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011]) is a rare exception to this complacency typical of mainstream macroeconomists, but its insistence that excessive private and public debt can lead to crises is not mentioned in Mueller's book.