The leaderless economy Temin, Peter; Temin, Peter; Vines, David
2013., 20130120, 2013, 2013-01-20, 20130101, c2013
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The Leaderless Economyreveals why international financial cooperation is the only solution to today's global economic crisis. In this timely and important book, Peter Temin and David Vines argue that ...our current predicament is a catastrophe rivaled only by the Great Depression. Taking an in-depth look at the history of both, they explain what went wrong and why, and demonstrate why international leadership is needed to restore prosperity and prevent future crises.
Temin and Vines argue that the financial collapse of the 1930s was an "end-of-regime crisis" in which the economic leader of the nineteenth century, Great Britain, found itself unable to stem international panic as countries abandoned the gold standard. They trace how John Maynard Keynes struggled for years to identify the causes of the Great Depression, and draw valuable lessons from his intellectual journey. Today we are in the midst of a similar crisis, one in which the regime that led the world economy in the twentieth century--that of the United States--is ending. Temin and Vines show how America emerged from World War II as an economic and military powerhouse, but how deregulation and a lax attitude toward international monetary flows left the nation incapable of reining in an overleveraged financial sector and powerless to contain the 2008 financial panic. Fixed exchange rates in Europe and Asia have exacerbated the problem.
The Leaderless Economyprovides a blueprint for how renewed international leadership can bring today's industrial nations back into financial balance--domestically and between each other.
From Financial Crash to Debt Crisis Reinhart, Carmen M.; Rogoff, Kenneth S.
The American economic review,
08/2011, Volume:
101, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Newly developed historical time series on public debt, along with data on external debts, allow a deeper analysis of the debt cycles underlying serial debt and banking crises. We test three related ...hypotheses at both "world" aggregate levels and on an individual country basis. First, external debt surges are an antecedent to banking crises. Second, banking crises (domestic and those in financial centers) often precede or accompany sovereign debt crises; we find they help predict them. Third, public borrowing surges ahead of external sovereign default, as governments have "hidden domestic debts" that exceed the better documented levels of external debt.
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Why did governments adopt austerity policies, and why were they so harmful? Why did the media largely ignore the majority of experts who opposed these policies, and allow politicians to get away with ...lies? And why did voters choose Brexit when the economic consensus was that it would harm living standards? Simon Wren-Lewis, winner of the SPERI/New Statesman Prize for Political Economy, is one of Britain's most respected economists. Since 2012, his widely-read Mainly Macro blog has been an influential resource for policymakers, academics and social commentators around the world. This book presents some of his most important work, telling the story of how the damaging political and economic events of recent years became inevitable. With new material including a preface by Nobel prize-winner Paul Krugman, these dispatches from the front-line serve as an essential guide to some of the most important economic and political issues facing us today, and as a warning to avert future disasters on this scale.
The Politics of Crisis in Europe explores the resilience of the European Union in the face of repeated crises perceived to threaten its very existence. While it is often observed after the fact that ...these crises serve as opportunities for integration, this is the first critical analysis to suggest that we cannot fully understand the nature and severity of these crises without recognising the role of societal reaction to events and the nature of social narratives about crisis, especially those advanced by the media. Through a close examination of the 2003 Iraq crisis, the 2005 constitutional crisis, and the 2010–12 Eurozone crisis, this book identifies a pattern across these episodes, demonstrating how narratives about crises provide the means to openly air underlying societal tensions that would otherwise remain under the surface, impeding further integration.
A common legacy of banking crises is a large increase in government debt, as fiscal resources are used to shore up the banking system. Do crisis response strategies that commit more fiscal resources ...lower the economic costs of crises? Based on evidence from a sample of 40 banking crises we find that the answer is negative. In fact, policies that are riskier for the government budget are associated with worse, not better, post-crisis performance. We also show that parliamentary political systems are more prone to adopt bank rescue measures that are costly for the government budget. We take advantage of this relationship to instrument the policy response, thereby addressing concerns of joint endogeneity. We find no evidence that endogeneity is a source of bias.
This paper introduces a new database of financial crises, providing an important insight into the causes, duration, and consequences of different types of financial crises. Besides extending the ...systemic banking crises database by Laeven and Valencia (2020) to the period 1970–2019, we develop new approaches for the identification of currency and sovereign debt crises, which we regard as preferable in some respects to those in the literature. Covering 206 countries, our crises database draws on 151 systemic banking crises (1970–2019), 414 currency crises (1950–2019), 200 sovereign debt crises (1960–2019), 75 twin crises (1970–2019), and 21 triple crises (1970–2019). We provide evidence that banking and debt crises tend to coincide or precede currency crises, while debt crises and banking crises are less likely to coincide with or precede each other. We also find that advanced countries experienced longer banking crises but shorter currency, debt, twin, and triple crises.
•A new comprehensive database of different types of financial crises is compiled.•New approaches are developed to identify currency and sovereign debt crises.•New database that covers 206 countries over the period 1970–2019.•Banking and debt crises coincide or precede currency crises.•Advanced countries experienced longer banking crises than any other crises.
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27.
Great Recession, The Grusky, David B; Western, Bruce; Wimer, Christopher
10/2011
eBook
Officially over in 2009, the Great Recession is now generally acknowledged to be the most devastating global economic crisis since the Great Depression. As a result of the crisis, the United States ...lost more than 7.5 million jobs, and the unemployment rate doubled—peaking at more than 10 percent. The collapse of the housing market and subsequent equity market fluctuations delivered a one-two punch that destroyed trillions of dollars in personal wealth and made many Americans far less financially secure. Still reeling from these early shocks, the U.S. economy will undoubtedly take years to recover. Less clear, however, are the social effects of such economic hardship on a U.S. population accustomed to long periods of prosperity. How are Americans responding to these hard times? The Great Recession is the first authoritative assessment of how the aftershocks of the recession are affecting individuals and families, jobs, earnings and poverty, political and social attitudes, lifestyle and consumption practices, and charitable giving. Focused on individual-level effects rather than institutional causes, The Great Recession turns to leading experts to examine whether the economic aftermath caused by the recession is transforming how Americans live their lives, what they believe in, and the institutions they rely on. Contributors Michael Hout, Asaf Levanon, and Erin Cumberworth show how job loss during the recession—the worst since the 1980s—hit less-educated workers, men, immigrants, and factory and construction workers the hardest. Millions of lost industrial jobs are likely never to be recovered and where new jobs are appearing, they tend to be either high-skill positions or low-wage employment—offering few opportunities for the middle-class. Edward Wolff, Lindsay Owens, and Esra Burak examine the effects of the recession on housing and wealth for the very poor and the very rich. They find that while the richest Americans experienced the greatest absolute wealth loss, their resources enabled them to weather the crisis better than the young families, African Americans, and the middle class, who experienced the most disproportionate loss—including mortgage delinquencies, home foreclosures, and personal bankruptcies. Lane Kenworthy and Lindsay Owens ask whether this recession is producing enduring shifts in public opinion akin to those that followed the Great Depression. Surprisingly, they find no evidence of recession-induced attitude changes toward corporations, the government, perceptions of social justice, or policies aimed at aiding the poor. Similarly, Philip Morgan, Erin Cumberworth, and Christopher Wimer find no major recession effects on marriage, divorce, or cohabitation rates. They do find a decline in fertility rates, as well as increasing numbers of adult children returning home to the family nest—evidence that suggests deep pessimism about recovery. This protracted slump—marked by steep unemployment, profound destruction of wealth, and sluggish consumer activity—will likely continue for years to come, and more pronounced effects may surface down the road. The contributors note that, to date, this crisis has not yet generated broad shifts in lifestyle and attitudes. But by clarifying how the recession’s early impacts have—and have not—influenced our current economic and social landscape, The Great Recession establishes an important benchmark against which to measure future change.
InFailure by Design, the Economic Policy Institute's Josh Bivens takes a step back from the acclaimed State of Working America series, building on its wealth of data to relate a compelling narrative ...of the U.S. economy's struggle to emerge from the Great Recession of 2008. Bivens explains the causes and impact on working Americans of the most catastrophic economic policy failure since the 1920s.
As outlined clearly here, economic growth since the late 1970s has been slow and inequitably distributed, largely as a result of poor policy choices. These choices only got worse in the 2000s, leading to an anemic economic expansion. What growth we did see in the economy was fueled by staggering increases in private-sector debt and a housing bubble that artificially inflated wealth by trillions of dollars. As had been predicted, the bursting of the housing bubble had disastrous consequences for the broader economy, spurring a financial crisis and a rise in joblessness that dwarfed those resulting from any recession since the Great Depression. The fallout from the Great Recession makes it near certain that there will be yet another lost decade of income growth for typical families, whose incomes had not been boosted by the previous decade's sluggish and localized economic expansion.
In its broad narrative of how the economy has failed to deliver for most Americans over much of the past three decades,Failure by Designalso offers compelling graphical evidence on jobs, incomes, wages, and other measures of economic well-being most relevant to low- and middle-income workers. Josh Bivens tracks these trends carefully, giving a lesson in economic history that is readable yet rigorous in its analysis. Intended as both a stand-alone volume and a companion to the newState of Working Americawebsite that presents all of the data underlying this cogent analysis,Failure by Designwill become required reading as a road map to the economic problems that confront working Americans.
Using a novel dataset, which merges good-level prices underlying the PPI with the respondents' balance sheets, we show that liquidity constrained firms increased prices in 2008, while their ...unconstrained counterparts cut prices. We develop a model in which firms face financial frictions while setting prices in customer markets. Financial distortions create an incentive for firms to raise prices in response to adverse financial or demand shocks. This reaction reflects the firms ' decisions to preserve internal liquidity and avoid accessing external finance, factors that strengthen the countercyclical behavior of markups and attenuate the response of inflation to fluctuations in output.
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This study examines how businesses respond to reputational damage caused by reputation crises. Drawing on the qualitative analysis of a Colombian natural medicine company facing a disruptive event ...that threatened its flagship product and business, the case study explores the company’s response to media suspicions of tampering with a phytotherapeutic product. The findings reveal significant inconsistencies in the firm’s organizational responses and their repercussions on stakeholders and the industry. This study sheds light on the strategic use of responses detached from reality in crisis scenarios to protect reputation. In addition, the study highlights that the analyzed company deviated from established crisis management strategies outlined in theory. The company did not implement the ‘steal the thunder’ approach, as it failed to proactively disclose the crisis. Moreover, the company prioritized instrumental responses over normative or ethical considerations. The analysis of the identified deviations from established crisis management principles further emphasizes the importance of the work’s findings and their theoretical and practical implications for developing more effective crisis communication strategies grounded in truth-seeking.
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