23.9.09

Reinventing Economics

As George Akerlof and I argue in our recent book Animal Spirits , the current financial crisis was driven by speculative bubbles in the housing market, the stock market, and energy and other commodities markets. Bubbles are caused by feedback loops: rising speculative prices encourage optimism, which encourages more buying, and hence further speculative price increases – until the crash comes.

[…] Yet events like the Great Depression, as well as the recent crisis, will never be fully understood without understanding bubbles. The fact that monetary-policy mistakes were an important cause of the Great Depression does not mean that we completely understand that crisis, or that other crises (including the current one) fit that mold.
Robert Schiller

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