G. Jones – Banking Crises (2016)

Автор: G. Jones
Название книги: Banking Crises (2016)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Экономика
Страницы: 365
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Why do banks collapse? Are financial systems more fragile in recent decades? Can policies to fix the banking system do more harm than good? What's the history of banking crises? With dozens of brief, non-technical articles by economists and other researchers, Banking Crises offers answers from diverse scholarly viewpoints.

Banking panics are nothing new: in rich and poor countries, the banking sector has
long had a troubling tendency to collapse. In the aftermath workers lose jobs, investment
collapses and the banking system tries to piece itself back together. Banking crises
are a puzzle, and economists love nothing more than a hard puzzle.
This volume collects some remarkable articles from The New Palgrave Dictionary
of Economics on banking crises, their historical background, the theories and laboratory
experiments that have investigated their causes, and some policy recommendations
that might make them less likely—or at least less destructive—in the future.
About one third of the articles were written after 2008, and so aren’t included in the
print version of the most recent New Palgrave, although I should note that all are
available through an online subscription to the Dictionary. Together with Palgrave
editor Alison Howson, I commissioned many of these more recent articles in the
wake of the global financial crisis. And through the efforts of Palgrave editor Rachel
Sangster the present volume brings together many of those new articles plus more
from the 2008 edition.
Allow me to point out three exceptional articles, all quite readable, that give a sense
of the volume’s scope:
1. A brief biography of Walter Bagehot, the Victorian-era editor of The Economist and
author of one of the best and most enjoyable essays on banking crises and their
cure, Lombard Street. The biography, written by the influential British historian and
life peer Asa Briggs, along the way describes the early banking panics that have
shaped how economists approach the topic.
2. Foote and Willen’s article entitled “subprime mortgage crisis” is provocative and
fact-driven. They argue the evidence doesn’t easily fit the popular story of a financial
crisis caused by Wall Street insiders. In that story, financial insiders lent money for
mortgages that were “doomed to failure,” and then sold off the resulting low-quality
mortgage-backed securities to ignorant investors. Foote and Willen are both Federal
Reserve economists; their article summarizes and synthesizes their own influential
work on the topic, work that has substantially (though not entirely) shifted the narrative
regarding the root causes of the crisis.
3. A thorough overview of Greece’s recent economic crises by Nicos Christodoulakis,
an economist and former Greek finance minister. This is just one sign of the
volume’s international scope, as well as a reminder that banking crises and debt crises
are all too often simultaneous events.
We can break the articles into four categories: historical crises, the global financial
crisis and aftermath, key economic institutions, and more theoretical, analytical pieces.
Historical Financial Crises
Bagehot, Walter
bubbles in history
gold standard
Great Depression
Great Depression, monetary and financial forces in
Kindleberger, Charles P.
Law, John
New Deal
South Sea bubble
tulipmania
The Global Financial Crisis and Its Aftermath
Credit Crunch Chronology
credit rating agencies
euro zone crisis 2010
Greek crisis in perspective
Lehman Brothers bankruptcy
quantitative easing by the major western central banks during the global financial
crisis
Run on Northern Rock, the
shadow banking: a review of the literature
subprime mortgage crisis, the
Key Financial Institutions
Bank of England
banking industry
Federal Reserve System
International Monetary Fund
international monetary institutions
Explanations and Solutions
banking crises
bubbles
capital controls
currency crises
currency crises models
laboratory financial markets
liquidity trap
Minsky crisis
speculative bubbles
You’ll note that the word “bubble” appears in the titles of four articles, and the concept
is central to even more, including the article “laboratory financial markets,” which
summarizes the work of Nobel laureate Vernon Smith. Understanding financial market
bubbles is central to understanding banking crises, and this volume offers a quite thorough
and diverse survey of the topic.
Overall, the articles are intellectually serious without being heavily mathematical; in
fact most contain no equations at all. While I am certainly not an unbiased observer, I
believe it’s a great volume for browsing, a good source of ideas and insights both to the
undergraduate writing a term paper and the faculty member looking for inspiration.
Banking crises are unlikely to vanish any time soon, so, alas, it’s safe to forecast that
this volume will be useful and relevant for decades to come