Philip Arestis and Elias Karakitsos

An analysis of the causes of the "Great Recession" and some policy implications

18 pages · 4.36 EUR
(October 2011)

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From the introduction:

Philip Arestis and Elias Karakitsos provide "An analysis of the causes of the 'Great Recession' and some policy implications". It is the authors' view that financial liberalisation alone cannot fully explain the 'Great Recession' crisis. Rather, there was a significant redistribution from wage earners to the financial sector, which took place from around the 1980s until today. The negative effect of greater inequality on spending power meant that ordinary families faced with a declining wage share became increasingly indebted. That redistribution, along with the financial liberalisation experience, produced the new financial engineering rooted in the U.S. which led to an extraordinary mispricing of risk. This, in turn, is associated with the ?moral hazard? problem, the result of governments offering protection to financial institutions against bankruptcy, which largely protects lenders from bad decisions. While Arestis and Karakitsos see these as the main causes of the crisis, they also discuss further contributory factors: the international imbalances, mainly due to the growth of China; the monetary policy pursued by countries over the period leading to the crisis; and the role played by the credit rating agencies. The authors conclude that the policy initiatives that have been put forward to ensure the avoidance of future crises are insufficient.