Crisis Economists

Crisis Economicsを60ページ、第2章まで。

In the early 1980s, Shiller conducted research demonstrating that stock prices exhibit far more volatility than the Efficient Market Hypothesis can possibly explain. By the end of that decade, he and other critics had amassed a remarkable body of evidence showing that asset prices rarely rest in a state of equilibrium but rather fluctuate wildly.

Mill provided a pretty accurate model of a classic boom-and-bust cycle, complete with features that apply to the world we inhabit today as much as they did to Mill’s: an external shock or catalyst for a boom; a speculative mania driven by psychology, not by fundamentals; a feedback mechanism that sends prices skyward; easy credit available to almost everyone; and the inevitable crash of the financial system, followed by plenty of collateral damage on the “real economy” of factories and workers.

According to Friedman and Schwartz, the Great Depression was not caused by a collapse in demand, as Keynes averred, but rather was a direct consequence of a decline in the quantity of bank deposits and bank reserves, which plummeted when frightened depositors withdrew their savings and banks shut down.

He(Minsky) focused on several neglected chapters of The General Theory that dealt with banks, credit, and financial institutions, and he synthesized them with insights from A Treatise on Money. Keynes, Minsky argued, had made a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. “Instability,” Minsky wrote, “is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism.”

According to some Austrian economists, Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression by intervening in the economy.

the Austrian approach is misguided when it comes to short-term policies.

Minsky correctly pointed out that resolving a financial crisis over the medium and long term requires that everyone from households to corporations to banks reduce their level of debt.

Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that’s the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come."

(Reinhart and Rogoff) showing that while the details of currency crashes, banking panics, and debt defaults change, the broader trajectory of crises varies little from decade to decade, century to century.