by From Geoff Davies and RWER Yet consider a model of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8 by Eggertsson and Krugman (2012), the latter a pseudo-Nobel prize winner. They made two models, one for before and one for after a crash, with the difference between the models being effectively that the amount of available credit was presumed to be less in the second. Nothing in the model determined the amount of credit, it was imposed from the outside. Their equations of optimisation did require sophisticated, though old-fashioned, analytical methods to solve, but that says nothing about the usefulness of the models. Both models are equilibrium models. But if the “before” state of the market, with high prices, was an equilibrium state there would be no crash. Therefore the model must be
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from Geoff Davies and RWER
Yet consider a model of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8 by Eggertsson and Krugman (2012), the latter a pseudo-Nobel prize winner. They made two models, one for before and one for after a crash, with the difference between the models being effectively that the amount of available credit was presumed to be less in the second. Nothing in the model determined the amount of credit, it was imposed from the outside. Their equations of optimisation did require sophisticated, though old-fashioned, analytical methods to solve, but that says nothing about the usefulness of the models.
Both models are equilibrium models. But if the “before” state of the market, with high prices, was an equilibrium state there would be no crash. Therefore the model must be missing the imbalance that drove the crash. It is therefore incapable of telling us why such a crash occurred. It cannot tell us anything about the dynamic process of boom and crash, the inflation and bursting of a debt bubble. It is not a useful model, it is a useless model, a dead end as far as understanding an observable economy is concerned.
read more: http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue95/Davies95.pdf