Tag Archives: Financial Crisis

September 15th marked the tenth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, destabilizing Western economies at levels not seen since the 1930s. It also marked the second week of fall classes, with many economics graduate students cranking through equations that define the discipline’s conventional macroeconomic models. With such names as New Classical, Real Business Cycle and New Keynesian, these models can all be traced to the rational expectations revolution of the 1970s, which sought to...

It’s ten years since the fall of Lehman Brothers. Ten years…. but it seems much longer. I look back on the mid-2000s as if they were a past century. Those days are gone forever, and the future is increasingly dark and uncertain. How a single event can change the course of history...“Do you remember yesterday, that was a hundred years ago?” cries Lucretia in Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, shortly before committing suicide. Lucretia's death was the event that brought about the fall...

The 10th anniversary of the September collapse of the US financial system has led to a number of commentaries on the causes of the Lehman bankruptcy and cures for its aftermath. Most tend to focus on identifying the proximate causes of the crisis in an attempt to assess the adequacy of the regulations put in place after the crisis to prevent a repetition. It is interesting that while Hy Minsky’s work became a touchstone of attempts to analyze the crisis as it was occurring, his work is...

Sheriff Bill at his best. Long and detailed analysis of liar's loans. New Economic PerspectivesBank Whistleblowers United Told DOJ to use 4506-T as Kryptonite v BankstersWilliam K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

The BoE’s decision to raise the Bank Rate to 0.75% is a mistake. It is a mistake comparable to those made by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve in the years between 2003 and 2006.  It is a mistake that must be understood in a wider context. Not just the political context – which promotes ‘monetary radicalism and fiscal conservatism’ – to quote David Cameron and George Osborne. But also in a wider monetary policy context.  As the governor of the Bank pointed out recently: ‘the Bank is the only...

So how does Mankiw answer the question he raises in his first sentence: “What caused the financial crisis of 2008?” He does not answer it. He not even explain why he does not answer his own question. New Economic PerspectivesMankiw Whiffs on “Learning the Right Lessons from the Financial Crisis”William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

On 19th July, 2018, I was stunned and honoured to receive the following from Professor Antonia Grunenberg of the Heinrich Boll Foundation, Bremen, Germany.  Berlin, July 19, 2018 Dear Mrs. Pettifor, it is my great pleasure to inform you in behalf of the international jury of  the „Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking“ that you have been unanimously selected to be the winner of the prize in 2018. Die date of the ceremony is December 7, 2018. The jury pointed out that you, a...

Abstract J M Keynes carefully read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) before he was 28. Of extreme importance to Keynes was Smith’s categorization of a group of upper income class citizens, whose speculative and financial interactions with the private banking industry created a very severe danger to the society as a whole, as being projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals. Keynes’s description of Smith’s projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals in the General Theory,...

I was interviewed by Martin Sandbu about the nature of money, in particular the importance of borrowers to the creation of money. A video was filmed at Bank Job, a wonderful charity dedicated to a) promoting understanding of money, b) cancelling the debts of the people of Walthamstow and c) using art to both advocate and fundraise. A link to their website is included here. Ann being interviewed by Daniel Edelstyn [embedded content] Related Posts

Review of Worst-Case Economics: Extreme Events in Climate and Finance by Frank Ackerman *** Long ago economics was termed “the dismal science,” but in recent years that title has arguably been passed on to climate science, with its regular and dire warnings that humanity needs to rapidly transition off of its use of fossil fuels for energy. In the face of such calls to action, progress has been frustratingly slow. The 2015 Paris Agreement offers some hope, as does the small-but-growing share...