Financial Stability in the Aftermath of the 'Great Recession'

by Arestis, Philip; Karakitsos, Elias

• ISBN13: 9781137333957
• ISBN10: 1137333952
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-10-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The financial crisis and the ensued 'great recession' are primarily caused by the excessive liquidity that was created in the last thirty years or so of inequality that benefited greatly the financial sector, deregulation and financial liberalisation as well as financial innovation, which are based on the supposedly superior intellectual model of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. There were also contributory factors that accentuated the process, such as international financial imbalances, the monetary policy pursued at the time, and the role played by the credit rating agencies. The New Consensus Macroeconomics model that forms the backbone of the way the economy works and how monetary policy should be formulated in theory and practice is scrutinised. It is argued that the traditional approach of viewing housing as a capital good must be dropped and housing should be viewed as a speculative asset, akin to equities. This new theorising is necessary as in the traditional approach bubbles cannot exist. A chapter is devoted to the causes of the European Union (EU) debt crisis, the reasons why the crisis has dragged on, the remedial treatment applied so far, offering alternative viable solutions to the crisis and examining the channels through which the EU debt crisis might spread to the rest of the world. Finally, the book draws on the lessons for theory and policy from the recent experience and discusses in detail the new regulatory environment that policymakers attempt to put in place to avert another credit crisis.

Author Biography

Philip Arestis is Director of Research, Cambridge Centre for Economics and Public Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, UK; Professor of Economics, Department of Applied Economics V, University of the Basque Country, Spain; Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Utah, US; Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute, New York, US; Visiting Professor, Leeds Business School, University of Leeds, UK; Professorial Research Associate, Department of Finance and Management Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK; and current holder of the British Hispanic Foundation 'Queen Victoria Eugenia' British Hispanic Chair of Doctoral Studies. He is Chief Academic Adviser to the UK Government Economic Service (GES) on Professional Developments in Economics. He has published as sole author or editor, as well as co-author and co-editor, a number of books, contributed in the form of invited chapters to numerous books, produced research reports for research institutes, and has published widely in academic journals.

Elias Karakitsos is chairman of Global Economic Research, a think tank for the world economy, financial markets and shipping, and Associate Member of the Centre for Economic and Pubic Policy, University of Cambridge. He was a professor at Imperial College, Head of Economics for 10 years and has acted as an advisor to the House of Commons, the UK, US and EU governments and financial institutions, including Citigroup, Oppenheimer, Allianz, Crédit Agricole and Standard Chartered. He is the author of five books/monographs, 90 papers in learned journals and more than 500 reports on the world economy financial markets and shipping.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Origins of the 'Great Recession'
3. The Theoretical Framework that Underpins the Origins of the 'Great Recession'
4. Too Much Liquidity: The Source of the Trouble
5. Anaemic Recovery: The US Housing Market and the Consumer
6. Anaemic Recovery: The Vicious Circle of Investment and Consumption
7. The Sovereign Debt Crisis
8. Lessons from the 'Great Recession' for both Theory and Economic Policy
9. Financial Stability and Proposals to Restore It