Método socrático: febrero 2010

Analisis e informacion de la FED de San Francisco

Testimonios ante el Congreso. Testimonio de Alan Greenspan. James Kwak comenta

Que ha concluido hasta ahora (18/3/2010) el Congreso?
Causas de la crisis segun Alan Greenspan. Greg Mankiw comenta. Sobre Mankiw comenta Arnold Kling
Le caen duro a Greenspan. Barry Ritholtz también lo ataca

Explicación de la crisis usando behavioral economics

William White describe las causas de la siguiente crisis

James Kwak sobre los testimonios

La visión de Robert Mundell

Las causas de la crisis según Russ Roberts. Scott Sumner comenta

Las causas de la crisis segun Arnold Kling

Brad DeLong contra los austriacos

Cuadro que muestra múltiples causas de la crisis

Paul Krugman vs Raghuram Rajan sobre la importancia de Fannie Mae y Freddie Mac como causantes de la crisis. Otro análisis. Krugman le responde a Rajan. Posts de Mark Thoma

Fueron los desbalances globales los causantes de la crisis? Columna en VoxEU. Comentarios de Menzie Chinn y de The Economist

Los alemanes rechazan las críticas de Krugman a su política económica

Raghuram Rajan dice que una de las causas de la crisis es la desigualdad producida por el cambio tecnologivo (seguida de malas políticas)

'The political economy of the subprime crisis'

James Galbraith dice que se debe restaurar el imperio de la ley en Wall Street para superar la crisis

Que papel jugo la Fed dentro de las causas de la crisis? David Beckworth y Mark Thoma

Discurso de Bernanke sobre las causas de la crisis

'Foreclosure fraud for dummies'

'Finance and the housing bubble'

Paper de Richard Clarida.

'A Minskyan explanation of the causes of the current crisis'

Why the low interest rates mattered. Post de David Beckworth

Gary Gorton sobre el 'shadow banking system'

Varias teorias sobre las causas de la crisis

Video de Charles Ferguson sobre la crisis

Una explicación de la crisis

Se pudo haber evitado la crisis? Debate en el NYT. Comentario de Menzie Chinn

Why did economists not spot the crisis? Responde Raghuram Rajan. Crítica a Rajan

Nuevo paper de Bernanke sobre las causas de la crisis. Su diagnóstico: alto ahorro de Asia. Resumen del WSJ. Un comentario. Otro

Brad DeLong explica modelos equivocados de la crisis financiera. I y II

Brad DeLong y Paul Krugman critican a Greenspan

The destruction of economic facts. Artículo de Hernando de Soto

Scott Sumner sobre el papel de Fannie y Freddy. Tyler Cowen vs Brad DeLong

No hay evidencia de que la política de vivienda del gobierno causó la crisis

Robert Hetzel: Una visión monetarista. (Aca el paper)Y reseñas del libro

Did the Taylor Rule cause the financial crisis?

Discurso de Andy Haldane

What really caused the crisis?

Krugman y DeLong critican a John Cochrane

Barry Rithholtz sugiere 5 libros

JW Mason sobre la teoría de las tasas demasiado bajas por demasiado tiempo:

"The first problem is that the different stories, while agreeing that interest rates were in some sense too low, don’t line up with each other. The blame-the-Fed and blame-the-Chinese arguments, while seemingly similar – and even sometimes made by the same people – are actually in tension, if not outright contradictory. After all, if interest rates are set by the Fed, they are not set by international capital flows, and conversely. More precisely, in a world of floating exchange rates and mobile capital – the world we’re normally supposed to live in – expansionary monetary policy should be associated with lower capital inflows, currency depreciation, and a more favorable trade balance. Any macro textbook will tell you that the high interest rates of the early 1980s (supposedly in part due to high federal deficits) were a big factor in the growth of the US trade deficit. So insofar as global imbalances are the issue, looseness at the Fed looks like part of the solution, not part of the problem. There’s a reason why Brazil has called the ultra-loose Fed policy of recent years a form of “currency war.”

...

But there’s a deeper set of problems here, which it’s not clear that any of the “far too low for far too long” proponents have really grappled with. It’s an article of faith that the private financial system channels society’s investable funds to their best use. That’s why we have a financial system! So if a big increase in funds available for investment – either due to an inflow of foreign savings, or the creation of liquidity by the banking system abetted by the Federal Reserve – flow to activities that are socially useless or worse, what does that tell us?

It seems to me there are only two possible answers. Either we have already invested in everything worth investing in, or the financial system is not doing its job. I cannot see how higher interest rates are an appropriate response in either case.

...

There is no reason to expect the financial system to be any more successful in channeling the savings made available via lower public deficits into productive investment, than it is supposed to have been in channeling the inflow of foreign savings.

I don’t think you can argue that a “savings glut” or low interest rates caused the crisis, and then go on arguing in other, longer-run contexts that higher public and/or private savings are desirable.

People making the argument that, in modern conditions, very low interest rates can only call forth speculative or wasteful investment, have implicitly accepted Keynes’ view that there is finite limit on the capital society requires, so that returns on private investment will fall toward zero as this limit is approached. But they haven’t followed him to the logical conclusion that in such a savings-abundant world, consumption and public expenditure should rise secularly until private investment disappears entirely.

Of course there’s an alternative view, which is that socially useful investment opportunities are far from exhausted, and savings are still scarce, but that the private financial system is no longer adequate for matching the latter with the former. If we were going to go this route, the first step would be to take seriously the idea that there is no “the interest rate,” there are various interest rates, and various degrees of access to credit, and they often don’t move together. And the relationship between the policy rate controlled by the central bank, and those various market rates, depends on the specific institutional and regulatory context.

Has everyone read Ben Bernanke’s classic article, Inside the Black Box? One of the key points he makes there is that in a world where reserve requirements don’t bind, one of the main channels by which monetary policy affects the real economy is via asset prices. Descriptively, I think that’s clearly right; but it’s a pretty crude instrument for steering aggregate activity, especially when you consider the positive feedback that tends to happen in asset markets. What if it turns out that the interest rate compatible with full employment is systematically lower than the interest rate compatible with stable asset prices? Does that mean we have to accept mass unemployment forever? That would seem to be the implication of “far too low for far too long.”

The alternative, of course, means more active management of credit. It means accepting that if we think government has a responsibility to maintain macroeconomic stability, a single policy instrument will not suffice. It means abandoning the conventional wisdom on macropolicy of the past three decades: Leave it to the central bank. It means that it’s not enough to set “the” interest rate, some policymaker will have to decide on the different interest rates for different kinds of borrowers, just like in the old days of European social democracy. (And just like in the old days, we may find that making this effective requires rather stringent limits on cross border financial flows.)"

Bernanke: Some reflections on the crisis and the policy response

Noah Smith: Did risky mortgage lending cause the financial crisis?

Adair Turner

"The financial crisis of 2007/08 occurred because we failed to constrain the private financial system’s creation of private credit and money."

"…the existence of banks as we know them today – fractional reserve banks – exacerbates these risks because banks can create credit and private money, and unless controlled, will tend to create sub-optimally large or sub-optimally unstable quantities of both credit and private money."

"Banks which can create credit and money to finance asset price booms are thus inherently dangerous institutions."

"The banking system can thus create credit and create spending power – a reality not well captured by many apparently common sense descriptions of the functions which banks perform. Banks it is often said take deposits from savers (for instance households) and lend it to borrowers (for instance businesses). But in fact they don’t just allocate pre-existing savings; collectively they create both credit and the deposit money which appears to finance that credit. Thus banks can create credit and private money."

"To restrain private people, it may be said, from receiving in payment the promissory notes of a banker, for any sum whether great or small, when they themselves are willing to receive them, or to restrain a banker from issuing such notes, when all his neighbours are willing to accept of them, is a manifest violation of that natural liberty which it is the proper business of law not to infringe, but to support. Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments, of the most free as well as of the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed"

"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."

"The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder."

http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/11/faith-based-economics.html

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