All Posts Tagged With: "financial crisis"
Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy
In 2001 Joseph Stiglitz was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, a fact prominently noted on the dust jacket of Freefall, his book on the financial crisis. In 2002 Stiglitz and two coauthors produced a report, commissioned and published by the government-sponsored housing agency Fannie Mae, stating that the risk of a failure by [...]
4Jan2012 | Lawrence H. White | 2 comments | ContinuedCrisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm’s book on the great subprime crisis gets off to a good start by dismissing as a red herring the “tired” argument attributing the boom to “greed” and focusing instead on “changes in the structure of incentives . . . that channeled greed in new and dangerous directions.” These included programs [...]
30Nov2011 | George A. Selgin | 2 comments | ContinuedAlchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System
The subprime crisis and financial meltdown have spawned dozens of books, some aimed at re-enshrining John Maynard Keynes, others at laying him to rest once more; some aimed at praising the Federal Reserve for staving off another Great Depression, others at blaming it for treating the economy to another cyclical episode. In Kevin Dowd and [...]
26Oct2011 | Roger W. Garrison | 0 comments | ContinuedSix Political Illusions: A Primer on Government for Idealists Fed Up with History Repeating Itself
You don’t believe in magic, do you? Magicians employ a variety of tricks to deceive audiences into thinking that something has happened that can’t. They are masters of illusion. Adults know that they’re being fooled when the rabbit seems to materialize out of an empty hat. Magic is harmless fun, but the government is not. [...]
25May2011 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | ContinuedUnchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy
This slim yet insight-packed volume makes fair progress toward explaining the 2008 financial crisis. The first of the book’s three chapters outlines the “housing industrial policy” that led to the crisis. The second discusses the conflict between concentrated political power and effective use of socially dispersed knowledge, and the third suggests reforms. Tracing the government’s [...]
23Mar2011 | David M. Brown | 3 comments | ContinuedToo Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves
Books about the 2008 financial crisis keep coming, and New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin offers one of the better accounts of the meltdown. Using a large number of interviews, he reconstructs the words and acts of key people during the six months from the near-collapse of Bear Stearns in March to the bankruptcy [...]
24Feb2011 | Chidem Kurdas | 0 comments | ContinuedThere’s Too Little Trust in Government?
There is one point on which I can unequivocally agree with E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s, column “Can We Reverse the Tide on Government Distrust?”: “So far, the Obama administration has missed the opportunity to demonstrate . . . how it is changing the way government works. How is its approach to . . . regulations [...]
22Oct2010 | Charles Johnson | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Rise and Fall of Glass-Steagall
The ongoing financial crisis has pundits, bloggers, academics, and politicians scrambling for explanations. Deregulation gets a major share of their attention, specifically the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Just what was Glass-Steagall and how did it come about? Bank failures were among the most dramatic and devastating aspects of the Great Depression. [...]
22Sep2010 | and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 6 comments | ContinuedGetting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis and The Housing Boom and Bust
These two books are must-reads for anyone wanting to have a working understanding of the economic and financial crisis. They complement each other and together form a civics lesson for an informed electorate. Economists are prone to write turgid prose and employ a jargon-filled style. Not these two gems. Each author is a deservedly well-regarded [...]
22Sep2010 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedFinancial Regulation Snake Oil
Recent turmoil set off by the threat of Greek insolvency shows how fast markets change. Fear about the inability of European governments to pay their debts caused the 2010 turbulence. By contrast, the 2008–2009 havoc was rooted in the collapse of property values. The next crisis will be about something else, possibly another government’s debt. [...]
25Aug2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Rise of Government and the Decline of Morality
The recent financial crisis has expanded the power of government. Tea parties have revealed the disillusion of millions of Americans with the rise of government and the decline of morality. The crisis has damaged, unfairly, the vision of market liberalism. It is essential, therefore, to reexamine and articulate the principles of a free society and [...]
29Jun2010 | James A. Dorn | 10 comments | ContinuedFinancial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis
Free-market greed stands accused of undermining the world financial system, but that is a mistaken analysis, writes Johan Norberg. The Swedish author made famous by his book In Defence of Global Capitalism is back to provide an explanation for the current financial crisis. Many factors led to the global financial fiasco, Norberg writes, including a [...]
20May2010 | Waldemar Ingdahl | 20 comments | ContinuedLet’s Take the “Crony” Out of “Crony Capitalism”
When Judge Richard Posner, the prolific conservative intellectual, released his book A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression last year, you might have thought the final verdict was in: Capitalism caused the economic downturn and high unemployment. That this verdict was pronounced by someone like Posner, who is associated [...]
24Mar2010 | John Stossel | 4 comments | ContinuedLegends of the Fall: The Real and Imagined Sources of Our Bubble Economy
Preface The Foundation for Economic Education is pleased to announce that Richard W. Fulmer of Humble, Texas, is the winner of the second annual Eugene S. Thorpe writing competition. Mr. Fulmer holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from New Mexico State University and for over 20 years has worked as a systems analyst in [...]
24Mar2010 | Richard W. Fulmer | 13 comments | ContinuedA Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression
Richard Posner’s latest book belongs to the fast-expanding cottage industry of financial crisis books. A federal judge with a grounding in economics, Posner would seem to be an ideal person to tackle this complicated subject. Alas, he provides neither fresh material nor an interesting perspective. Posner describes well-known events—the failure of investment banks Bear Stearns [...]
5Jan2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | ContinuedDeflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
During the current recession a number of commentators have made various comparisons to the Great Depression, mostly because of the dramatic decline in the stock market and ongoing troubles in the financial industry. When oil prices also began a dramatic decline in the autumn of 2008, pulling the overall consumer price level downward for the [...]
5Jan2010 | Steven Horwitz | 59 comments | ContinuedThe Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Reading The Return of Depression Economics, I have to admit I was surprised. Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics and New York Times columnist, isn’t as feisty and partisan in the book as he is in his column. Moreover, he presents some useful information about the many economic collapses that have occurred in [...]
18Nov2009 | William L. Anderson | 14 comments | Continued-
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