balance sheet recession

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pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

(New York: Norton, 1976); and Paul Krugman, “It’s Baaack: Japan’s Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (1998): 137–205. 7. Richard Koo, “The World in Balance Sheet Recession: What Post-2008 West Can Learn from Japan 1990–2005” (presentation, “Paradigm Lost: Rethinking Economics and Politics” conference, Berlin, April 15, 2012), http://ineteconomics.org/conference/berlin/world-balance-sheet-recession-what-post-2008-west-can-learn-japan-1990-2005. 8. The most cited reference to such helicopter drops of money is Milton Friedman, “The Optimum Quantity of Money,” in The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 1–50. 9.

A closely related reason for a pullback in spending after a wealth shock is precautionary savings, as in Christopher Carroll and Miles Kimball, “On the Concavity of the Consumption Function,” Econometrica 64 (1996): 981–92. Christopher Carroll has done a large amount of work exploring how wealth distribution matters for the pullback in spending during recessions. Related here is also the work of Richard Koo on what he calls the “balance sheet recession” in Japan, where indebted firms pull back on investment to deleverage. See Richard Koo, The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons [Asia], 2009). 6. See Paul Krugman, “It’s Baaack: Japan’s Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (1998): 137–205. 7.

Index Admati, Anat, 185 Agarwal, Sumit, 139 AIG, 32–33 Allen, Franklin, 94 American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act, 135–36 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, 163 Amromin, Gene, 139 Anenberg, Elliot, 193n7 animal spirits view, 10, 80–81, 83, 113, 196n8 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 147 asset price bubbles, 107–8, 111–13, 149, 164–65. See also housing boom of 2000–2007 asset price collapses, 42–45, 70 austerity measures, 163 auto industry: sales rates in, 5–6; unemployment in, 61–62, 64–65 Bagehot Rule, 124 balance sheet recession, 194n5 bank bailouts, 121–34, 142, 151; FDIC loans in, 124; Federal Reserve programs in, 124–26, 154–57; protection of deposits in, 123–26, 129; protection of stakeholders in, 126–27, 131–34; Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as, 136 bank crises, 7–9, 192n20; bank runs in, 123–26; current-account deficits in, 7–8; government protections in, 92–93, 119–29; household debt in, 8–9; IMF loans in, 92–95; real estate prices in, 7; short-term financing instruments in, 125; Spanish bankruptcy law and, 119–21, 184–85; stakeholders in, 121–23; stress in, 129, 130f.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Godley, Money, Finance and National Income Determination: An Integrated Approach, Levy Economic Institute Working Paper No. 167, June 1996. 12 See for example H. Minsky, The Financial Instability Hypothesis, Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 74. 13 Richard Koo of Nomura Research has popularised this dynamic as a ‘balance sheet recession’. See R. Koo, ‘The world in balance sheet recession: causes, cure, and politics’, Economic Review, issue 58, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue58/Koo58.pdf (accessed 4 May 2016). 14 J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London, Macmillan, 1965 [1936]. 15 Krugman, ‘Deficits saved the world’. 16 State and local government budgets also moved sharply into deficit, accounting for the additional rise seen in Figure 2.

Historical data on the federal budget is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historicals (accessed 4 May 2016). 17 Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs and Paul McCulley of PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund, both relied on Wynne Godley’s sector financial balances framework to help them see the positive role of government deficits in facilitating the deleveraging process. See for example Hatzius’ 2012 interview with the Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/goldmans-jan-hatzius-on-sectoral-balances-2012-12?IR=T (accessed 4 May 2016). 18 M. Wolf, ‘The balance sheet recession in the US’, Financial Times, 19 July 2012, http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2012/07/19/the-balance-sheet-recession-in-the-us/ (accessed 4 May 2016). 19 P. McCulley, Global Central Bank Focus: Facts on the Ground, Policy Note 2010/2, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 2010, p. 3, http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/pn_10_02.pdf (accessed 4 May 2016). 20 L.

The foreign sector may also accumulate net financial assets (NFAs) as a consequence of government deficit spending; however, the point here is to focus on private sector balance sheets. For a full treatment, see W. Mitchell and L. R. Wray, ‘Introduction to monetary and fiscal policy operations’, Chapter 9. 23 As Wolf (‘The balance sheet recession in the US’) notes, ‘the financial balance of the private sector shifted towards surplus by the almost unbelievable cumulative total of 11.2 percent of gross domestic product between the third quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2009’. 24 Even those who took a more dove-ish position often emphasised the need to adopt policies aimed at balancing the budget in the medium or longer term, prompting opposition from post-Keynesians.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The overall impact of such a crisis, therefore, is some weakening of supply, relative to its pre-crisis trend, but, even more, a weakening of demand relative to the weakened supply. The danger is a prolonged period of what Richard Koo of Nomura Research calls ‘balance-sheet recession’, in which the debt-encumbered private sector either tries, or is forced, to lower its debts – or, at the least, is unwilling or unable to increase them.65 What happened after the crisis to US sectoral balances – the balance between income and spending of households, corporations, the government and foreigners – offers a classic picture of an economy going into such a balance-sheet recession. Foreigners have run a surplus with the US for a long time and continued to do so, on a slightly smaller scale, following the crisis.

Even if the post-crisis performance of these economies was not dreadful by previous standards, the crisis proved painful and enfeebling. Why do financial crises do that? And why did the recovery stall or even go into reverse, in some cases? To answer those questions, we need to understand balance-sheet recessions. THE ECONOMICS OF POST-CRISIS DE-LEVERAGING Big financial crises cause painful recessions. Big financial crises that follow huge credit booms cause particularly painful recessions and long periods of weak growth. Professor Alan Taylor of the University of Virginia, a well-known economic historian, notes that ‘a credit boom and a financial crisis together appear to be a very potent mix that correlates with abnormally severe downward pressures on growth, inflation, credit and investment for long periods’.58 At bottom, there are five things going on in post-crisis economies.

However, what was done halted the immediate panic and then reversed the downswing that was well under way in late 2008 and early 2009. It succeeded in doing so even though the recession was initially as bad as it had been in 1930. Unfortunately, policymakers failed to sustain the policies required to support private-sector de-leveraging and so avoid a prolonged balance-sheet recession. Largely as a result, the recovery proved weak or even withered away altogether in 2011 and 2012. For this unhappy outcome, the Eurozone crisis was partly responsible. It turned out to be the second act of the global financial crisis. It is, accordingly, the subject of the next chapter. 2 The Crisis in the Eurozone Whatever role the markets have played in catalysing the sovereign debt crisis, it is an indisputable fact that excessive state spending has led to unsustainable levels of debt and deficits that now threaten our economic welfare.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Personal consumption hit a record high.8 The United States sported the largest current account deficit in its history – a signal that the country was spending far more than it earned.9 While Ben Bernanke at the Fed warned of a global ‘savings glut’, the United States was suffering a dearth of domestic savings. After the housing bubble burst, consumers found themselves saddled with too much debt. The United States appeared to be on the brink of a ‘balance sheet recession’, the name given to economic contractions that occur when overstretched borrowers cut spending to pay off their debts. Whereas Japan’s balance sheet recession of the 1990s saw companies reduce their leverage, now it was the turn of US households to tighten their belts.10 Research showed that those parts of the country with the steepest decline in household net worth during the housing bust experienced the sharpest decline in consumer spending.11 The authorities pulled every fiscal and monetary lever to boost consumption.

The resolution of Scandinavia’s banking crisis in the early 1990s showed that dealing promptly with bad debts speeded up the economic recovery. But ultra-low interest rates after 2008 enabled banks to delay this painful process, encouraging them to keep bad debts on their books. Japan’s interminable ‘balance sheet recession’ revealed the pitfalls of failing to grasp the nettle. Most Western countries now took the Japanese path. Non-performing loans proliferated on the balance sheets of banks, like cancerous cells. The problem of ‘evergreening’, or renewing, bad debts was acute in Europe. Zombie companies became commonplace.

Whereas Japan’s balance sheet recession of the 1990s saw companies reduce their leverage, now it was the turn of US households to tighten their belts.10 Research showed that those parts of the country with the steepest decline in household net worth during the housing bust experienced the sharpest decline in consumer spending.11 The authorities pulled every fiscal and monetary lever to boost consumption. Washington ran trillion-dollar deficits and the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to zero and sprayed money around Wall Street. The balance sheet recession was averted. But, as Nassau Senior might have predicted, the collapse in interest rates reduced incentives to abstain from consumption or save for the future. After 2008, the US net savings rate (which includes capital consumption) turned negative for the first time since the Great Depression.


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

To explain this, there is no need to invoke the specter of Swedish consumers watching unlikely bond spreads while fretting about the national debt of one of the most solvent countries in the world. This is hyperbolic neoliberal fantasy looking for a set of supporting econometrics. Simply paying back debt when the economy is tanking, a classic “Balance Sheet Recession” a la Richard Koo, would suffice to explain what’s going on.129 That consumption didn’t rise is not a surprise unless you frame the problem in this absurdly counterintuitive way. That it stayed constant is the evidence for a common or garden stimulus effect—it didn’t fall despite the bust.

., 21–22. 124. Ibid., 23. 125. Ibid., 24. 126. Ibid., 29. The word “laxitude” is theirs. 127. Peter Englund, “The Swedish Banking Crisis: Roots and Consequences” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 15, 3 (1999): 89. 128. Ibid., 94. 129. Richard Koo, “The World in Balance Sheet Recession,” Real-World Economics Review 58 (2011): 19–37. 130. Roberto Perotti’s discussion of Sweden in “The ‘Austerity Myth’” is a vastly superior account of the Swedish experience that concludes that what made the difference wasn’t expectations—it was exports. See especially, 37–41. 131.

, 123, 124 General Theory, 126, 127, 145 in Germany, 195 in Ireland, 208 Keynesian economics, ix, 16, 39, 54–56, 122, 137, 140–141, 149 See also Phillips curve on austerity, 97–98, 101, 125–131 “paradox of thrift”, 8 rediscovery of, 221 Kinsella, Stephen, 61, 208 Kirkman, Geoffrey, ix Kirshner, Jonathan, 202 Koo, Richard “Balance Sheet Recession”, 211 Konczal, Mike, 212, 213 Krugman, Paul, 11, 55, 165, 207 and the euro, 78 Krups, 132 Kuronuma, Yuji, 197 Kwak, James, 11 Kydland, Finn, 157 Lagarde, Christine, 218 Landsbanki, 237 “Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes versus Spending” (Alesina and Ardagna), 173, 212 Latvia austerity in, 18, 103, 179, 216–226, 217 fig. 6.1, 221 Laval, Pierre, 202 Law, John and the national debt of France, 114 Lehman Brothers, 25, 29 leverage, 32 and banking, 25, 26, 32 of European banks, 89 ratios of, 48 liberalism, 98–101 See also neoliberalism liquidationism, 101, 119–122, 204 liquidity support, 45 List, Friedrich, 134 Lithuania austerity in, 18, 103, 179, 216–226, 217 fig. 6.1 Lloyd George, David “We Can Conquer Unemployment”, 123, 124 Lo, Andrew, 22 Locke, John, 17, 100–101 and austerity, 114–115 and the creation of the market, 105–106 as an economic revolutionary, 104–105 on taxes, 106 relationship between the market and the state, 115–122 Second Treatise of Government, 104 Long Term Capital Management.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

Their curtailment of expenditures were not so much fear induced, as financially induced.28 Half a century after Greenspan wrote these paragraphs, the world succumbed to another violent stock market decline, and economists pronounced learnedly on “balance-sheet recessions”—ones that follow a crippling destruction of wealth rather than a mere falloff in spending. The pronouncements were frequently coupled with denunciations of the Greenspan Fed: if only Greenspan had understood balance-sheet recessions and how painful they could be, he surely would have acted more decisively as the bubble of the 2000s inflated. But the truth, as revealed in Greenspan’s 1959 paper, is that he had been thinking about balance-sheet recessions for decades—in fact, he had been aware of them for longer than many of his critics had been breathing.

The economy was slowing not simply because the Fed was disciplining credit but because overextended banks and customers were disciplining themselves.30 Darman and the doves on the Federal Open Market Committee were turning out to be right. The United States was experiencing what economists would later call a balance-sheet recession.31 In mid-December, with the economy still weak, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady seized a chance to push Greenspan to ease faster. Manley Johnson, the Fed’s young vice chairman, had announced his intention to step down; and Brady sent a memo to the White House, weighing in on Johnson’s replacement.

In 1977, when he had returned to his consultancy after his stint at the White House, he had led the pack in pointing out how strong household balance sheets, buoyed by rising house prices, had unleashed a deluge of home-equity extraction that was driving the business cycle. Greenspan’s sensitivity to the power of finance was sufficiently developed that even the best critiques of his policy during 1990–91 do not explain where he went wrong. Looking back on the balance-sheet recession a year later, Ben S. Bernanke, the Princeton professor who had commented so thoughtfully on Black Monday, proposed a rethink of how money affected the economy: it was not just the price of credit that mattered; the health of banks and borrowers determined how much lending took place, and hence also the amount of spending and growth in the economy.


pages: 268 words: 75,490

The Knowledge Economy by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, balance sheet recession, business cycle, collective bargaining, commoditize, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, global value chain, information asymmetry, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, means of production, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, post-Fordism, radical decentralization, savings glut, secular stagnation, side project, tacit knowledge, total factor productivity, transaction costs, union organizing, wealth creators

And although it evoked the standard response of fiscal stimulus and expansionary monetary policy (the latter, contrary to the spirit of Keynes’s prescriptions, even more than the former), it was soon recognized as a breakdown different in character and causation, if not in consequence, from the one that had faced Keynes. Some described it as a “balance-sheet recession,” in which exorbitant household and corporate debt triggered financial instability that later contaminated the real economy. The United States had stopped making enough goods and services that the rest of the world wanted. For several decades, there had been a sharply regressive redistribution of income and wealth.

To be a truly general theory of the failure of supply and demand to carry each other to the next level of incitement to economic growth, it would need to include a view of production and of its reshaping. This failing explains why Keynesianism has been judged even by many of its followers to be an inappropriate or at least insufficient response to the “balance-sheet recessions” of the early twenty-first century. These recessions were prompted in part by the inability of debt, credit, and easy money, in the context of worldwide capital and trade imbalances, to make up for the lack of sustained rises in productivity and of broad-based, socially inclusive economic growth.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. 13. Irving Fisher, “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions,” Econometrica 1, no. 4 (1933): 337–57; Richard Koo, “Balance Sheet Recession Is the Reason for ‘Secular Stagnation,’ ” VoxEU, 11 August 2014, https://voxeu.org/article/balance-sheet-recession-reason-secular-stagnation. 14. See Robert Shiller, Finance and the Good Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, for more on equity-like financial products to make people’s lives less risky. 15. Shiller. 16.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Despite that massive policy stimulus to aggregate demand, economies have been limping along. Recoveries following financial crises have historically tended to be slower than downturns unaccompanied by such crises.2 But there is no unique pattern across different episodes. Diagnoses using expressions such as ‘balance sheet recession’, ‘headwinds’ and ‘secular stagnation’, which have all entered the currency of popular debate, are descriptions of symptoms, not causes.3 What are the underlying drivers of a prolonged period of low demand and weak growth? Why do ‘crises’ lead to a long period of stagnation? To answer those questions requires us to look more deeply into macroeconomics – the study of how the economy operates as a whole.

Firth who, as a pupil in 1918, took all ten wickets for Winchester against Eton (reprinted in The Trusty Servant, Winchester College, May 2010). 47 Financial Times, 19 December 2014. 48 Blakey (1839), p. 6. 49 Keynes (1936), p. 383. 50 Ibid, p. 383: ‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ 8 HEALING AND HUBRIS: THE WORLD ECONOMY TODAY 1 IMF World Economic Outlook Database, Spring 2015. 2 Reinhart and Rogoff (2009). 3 Central banks have been referring to ‘headwinds’ regularly since 2008; for a number of years the Bank for International Settlements promoted the idea that the risks from rising levels of debt were a threat to stability and that the resulting crisis was a ‘balance sheet recession’ (see various of their annual reports). Lawrence Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury Secretary, argued at an International Monetary Fund conference on 16 November 2013 that an age of secular stagnation, in which the equilibrium interest rate was negative, might explain the lack of inflationary pressure before the crisis of 2008 and the lack of growth after it. 4 Keynes himself described his work as a contrast to the ‘classical’ theory of economics.


pages: 491 words: 131,769

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Moreover, the current recession is different from previous ones. This recent crisis was born of excessive debt and leverage in the household sector, the financial system, and even the corporate sector. The recession wasn’t driven by monetary tightening; it was a “balance sheet” recession driven by a staggering accumulation of debt. Recent research by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff suggests that a “balance sheet” recession can lead to a weak recovery, as every sector of the economy “deleverages” and cuts down its debt. This will take a while. Households in the United States and the United Kingdom have saved too little and spent too much.


pages: 632 words: 159,454

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

The ‘catastrophic fall in the money value not only of commodities but of practically every kind of asset’ had been an ‘obvious’ immediate cause of the financial panic. In the modern jargon beloved of today’s economists and journalists, Keynes initially identified the Great Depression as a phenomenon akin to a ‘balance sheet recession’. He continued his assessment that the ‘assets of banks in very many countries – perhaps in all countries with the probable exception of Great Britain – are no longer equal, conservatively valued, to their liabilities to their depositors’. This indebtedness, in Keynes’s analysis, was widespread in the economy, involving both individuals and governments in the whirlpool of insolvency: ‘Debtors of all kinds no longer have assets equal in value to their debts.

Index accountancy, 87 Acheson, Dean, 139 Ackley, Gardner, 204–5 Adams, Brooks, 61 Adams, John, 41 Addison, Lord, 150 Adenauer, Konrad, 182, 186–7 Afghanistan Soviet invasion, 227, 237 US invasion, 310, 321, 350 Aislabie, John, 35, 37 Akins, James, 224 Alsace-Lorraine, 120 Amato, Giuliano, 270 American Civil War, 50, 70–6, 80, 109, 135, 190, 214, 219, 333 American colonies and paper money, 5, 41–3, 46 and taxation, 39–40, 103 American Declaration of Independence, 41 American Revolution, 3, 6, 40–2, 50 ‘American System’, 70 American War of Independence, 40–3, 45, 66–7 ‘American Way of Life’, 153, 166 Amsterdam, 25, 28, 36 Andreotti, Giulio, 275 Anglo-American loan, 155–8, 160, 174, 179 Anglo-Egyptian Bank, 89 Anglo-Mexican Mining Association, 56 Annan, Lord, 172 Antwerp, 20, 22 ‘Spanish fury’, 12 Archivo General de Indias, 19 Argentina, 84–5 army, payments to, 26 Asian financial crisis, 289–93, 296 ‘assignats’, 5, 45–8, 50 Atahualpa, 15–17 atomic bombs, 153, 192 Attlee, Clement, 175 Attwood, Thomas, 54 austerity, 342–3, 356 auto manufacturers, 315 autobahns, 133 Aztecs, 13, 22 Bagehot, Walter, 62–5, 79, 99, 127, 164, 170 ‘bailouts’, 329 Baker, Howard, 250 ‘balance sheet recessions’, 129 balanced budgets, commitment to, 6–7, 234, 245, 296, 358 Japan and, 193–4 US and, 162–3, 168–70, 202–4, 207, 209, 333 Bancor, 140, 142 Bank Act, 59, 61, 64 bank bailouts, 331–3 bank failures, 56, 62–5, 127 Bank of Amsterdam, 28, 30 Bank of England Bagehot and, 64–5 bankruptcy of serving Governors, 57–8, 65 and Barings crisis, 85 compared with Bank of Japan, 195–6 conversion of dollar holdings, 217–18 conversion of government debt, 34 and devaluation, 178–81 election of directors, 64–5 and ERM departure, 270–2 establishment of, 3, 24–5, 28 and Gold Pool, 212 gold reserves, 85, 90, 92 as lender of last resort, 49 nationalization of, 171, 178 and outbreak of First World War, 92, 144 quantitative easing, 342–3 resumption of gold payments, 50–4 sole issuer of paper money, 59–60 and South Sea Bubble, 35 suspension of gold payments, 3, 48–50, 53, 61, 144 Bank of France, 48, 85, 272 Bank of Japan, 195–7, 199–200 Bank of Japan, 289 bank runs, 290 Bankers Trust, 121 banking regulation, 351 ‘Banking School’, 64 banking union, proposed European, 351 banks, Japanese, 195–6, 199–200 Banque Générale, 30, 33 Barclays Bank, 82 Baring, Sir Francis, 49–50, 79 Barings Bank, 49, 83–5, 91 Barnes, Fred, 311–12 Bear Stearns, 328 Beck, Sir Justus, 37 Belgium, 174, 280 Bell, Clive, 91 Berlin, Isaiah, 233 Berlin, post-war, 184–6 Berlin stock market, 122 Bernanke, Ben, 126–7, 327, 343 Bernstein, Edward, 139 Bethlehem Steel Corporation, 106–7 Bevin, Ernest, 183 Biddle, Nicholas, 68 ‘big government conservatism’, 311–12, 321 Bild, 275 ‘bimetallism’, 77 Birmingham manufactures, 50 Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, 89 Bizet, Georges, 19 ‘Black Friday’, 76, 259 Blackburn, Robin, 325 Blinder, Alan S., 304 Blodgett, Ralph, 160–1 Bodin, Jean, 20–1 Boehner, John, 349 Bolles, Albert, 42 Bonar Law, Andrew, 109 bond market, growth of, 317 bondholders, 52–3, 71–2, 172 Boothby, Robert, 141–2, 149 Bovard, James, 310 Bowie Bonds, 324–5 Bracegirdle, Anne, 27 ‘Bradburies’, 92 Brady, Nick, 269 Brand, Robert, 109 Brandon, Henry, 219–20 Brazil, 350 Bretton Woods Agreement, 2, 4, 138–5, 149–50, 155–6, 158–60, 216, 351 collapse of, 217, 219, 226, 234, 299, 356, 359 and dollar link to gold, 140–4, 149–50, 167–70, 208–12, 250–1 and European monetary union, 263, 273 and exchange rates, 140–4, 149–50 and ‘fundamental disequilibrium’, 140, 144 and Japan, 197, 200–1 Bridges, Sir Edward, 145, 174–5, 179 Bright, John, 246 Britain bubble of 1825, 54–7, 61 decline in world status, 145, 147, 176, 181 deflation, 54–5, 115 departure from gold standard, 129, 131–2, 206 Edwardian complacency, 82–3 ERM entry and departure, 266–72 and European monetary union, 263–4 First World War finance, 102–5, 108–9 food rationing, 182 gold reserves, 167, 227 move to paper money, 48–51, 53–4, 135 national debt, 6, 84, 93, 105, 108–9, 147–8, 295, 341–2, 352, 355 overseas investments, 101, 109, 171 overseas loans, 105, 107–8 PSBR, 244 quantitative easing, 342–3 return to gold standard, 109, 111–15, 118–19, 123, 142–3, 181 suspension of gold standard, 92–3, 98, 107–8, 144 war debt, 144–5 British Commonwealth, 156, 176 Brown, Gordon, 331–3, 351 Bryan, William Jennings, 77, 107 Buchanan, Patrick, 285–6 Buenos Ayres Water Works Company, 85 Bundesbank, 187, 264, 266–7, 270, 272–3 Burke, Edmund, 5, 45, 48–9 Burns, Arthur F., 215–16, 218, 233, 235, 239–41 Burns, Terry, 271 Bush, George H.


pages: 318 words: 77,223

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

During presentations to the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Washington, D.C., she referred to the new-normal phenomenon as the “new mediocre.”10 However one labels it, various explanations have been put forward for this unusual and worrisome phenomenon—from the difficulties of escaping a liquidity trap and the challenging aspects of balance sheet recessions to a change in productivity trends, lack of infrastructure investment, the effects of debt overhangs, demography, and “the race against the machines.” These are all factors that, first, hold actual growth below the potential of the economy, and second, act to pull down future potential growth.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Some, like Kenneth Rogoff, argue that slow growth and productivity are to be expected in the wake of a massive financial crisis.20 Households and businesses will all be attempting to deleverage at the same time, creating a Keynesian “paradox of thrift” — the kind of reverse economic multiplier caused when governments, households, or businesses cut their spending. This effect is exacerbated during what Richard Koo calls a “balance sheet recession”, caused by excessive lending. But others argue that the paradox of thrift can’t explain sluggish growth on its own, not least because the slow-down in growth rates appears to have preceded the financial crisis. In fact, the asset price inflation of the pre-crisis period and the large profits generated by the finance sector disguised a long-standing slowdown in other parts of the economy.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

When an economic shock hits or interest rates rise, the economy is then faced with a situation where all sectors of the economy (apart from the government), led by households, seek to deleverage and reduce their debts – ‘rebuilding their balance sheets’ (Koo, 2011). Households reduce their spending and increase their savings, this reduces firms’ profits, leading them to pull back from investment and pay off their debts, and banks contract their lending and rebuild their capital base. A range of studies show that such balance sheet recessions tend to last longer and be deeper than crises that do not involve credit bubbles (e.g. stock market bubbles); and within the universe of recessions caused by credit bubbles, land-related credit bubbles are consistently deeper and last longer (Buyukkarabacak and Valev, 2006; Schularick and Taylor, 2009; Borio et al., 2011; Bezemer and Zhang, 2014; Jordà et al., 2015).


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The signal worked again with the 1989 and 2000 inversions and even with the inversion in the fourth quarter of 2005 and the first quarter of 2006; however, the lag from the last inversion to the beginning of the recession in December 2007 was abnormally long. This empirical relation may be stronger when Fed tightening causes recessions and Fed easing leads the recovery, typical features of postwar business cycles. The story may be different in balance sheet recessions caused by financial de-leveraging, as in the 1930s and 2008, where the Fed has less power to affect the economy. Not surprisingly, many firms have developed composite financial conditions indices that go beyond the monetary policy stance. Such indices have been superior predictors of real activity during the past decade.

Expected inflation and ex ante real bond yield have not exhibited much cyclicality. 26.2 TYPICAL BEHAVIOR OF REALIZED RETURNS AND EX ANTE INDICATORS ACROSS DIFFERENT ECONOMIC REGIMES Business cycles differ in their depth and duration. The most important contrast is between typical post-World War II recessions, arguably caused by Fed tightening, and balance sheet recessions, caused by de-leveraging after financial excesses (as in the 1930s and 2000s); the latter are more severe. It is also interesting to observe how the cyclical growth environment intersects with other key drivers of asset returns, such as inflation and volatility. I create three composite dummy series—real growth, inflation, and volatility—and document average realized asset returns and proxies for ex ante returns in relevant data subsets.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

But, as I argued in the first edition of this book, there is one powerful factor militating against a return to stability and order: the economy. Europe’s great slide backwards, beginning in October 2011, as the G20 summit at Cannes ended in paralysis, has dragged the world economy backwards. In a balance-sheet recession, where recovery is impaired by overhanging debts, all policy can do is to keep the patient alive. Sustained recovery can only begin when the debt mountains are diminished—either by inflation, currency wars or aggressive defaults. In turn, each of these shatters the basis of the old economic order: inflation wipes out the savings of the salaried workforce and the middle class; currency wars trigger the break-up of globalization; default—by states, banks and individuals—reduces parts of the finance system to rubble.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

It will reform in its own ways, but focus mainly on administrative and bureaucratic measures designed to increase the operational efficiency of enterprises, and organisational changes to make various levels of government work better. We shall have to reserve judgement as to whether China’s way will succeed in keeping a balance sheet recession at arm’s length indefinitely, and in developing industrial and engineering successes into transformative and commercialised technologies that set global standards. My hunch is that it will come up short. Conscious that this sceptical view will not find favour everywhere, we can, however, all agree that if China succeeds in avoiding the middle-income trap, it would be the first authoritarian country or dictatorship to do so. 8 TRADE DOGS OF WAR When Mark Antony utters the words ‘let slip the dogs of war’ after the assassination of Julius Caesar, he is thought to be referring to devices in civilised societies that allow or inhibit war.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

As Richard Koo points out in his book, The Holy Grail of Macro Economics: Lessons From Japan’s Great Recession,11 economists had previously thought that if you cut interest rates low enough, people would always borrow. With rates at 0.5 per cent, businesses would surely be able to find profitable projects that earned more. But Japan showed that was not necessarily the case. In Koo’s view, Japan suffered a balance-sheet recession, in which companies found that their assets were worth less than their debts. The last thing they wanted was to borrow any more. Instead, low interest rates simply made it easier for them to service, and eventually reduce, their debts. Japan is also an example of an ageing society, one where the retired cohort is growing faster than the working population, and where the overall population is starting to shrink.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

In 2014, the percentage of SMEs that applied for a bank loan and got everything they asked for was 78 percent in Austria, 75 percent in Germany, 77 percent in France, and 80 percent for Denmark, but 24 percent in Greece, 54 percent in Italy, and 53 percent in Spain. In 2009, the same figure was 33 percent for Greece, 62 percent for Portugal, and 50 percent for Spain. ¶ That was why the 2008 recession was often referred to as a balance-sheet recession, but it was, of course, much more than that. # As we noted in Chapter 2, the Single Market without deposit insurance and other elements of a banking union meant that money flowed out of the crisis countries, and especially out of their banks, necessitating cutbacks in bank lending. Reforms and institutional innovations, such as the ESM and the banking union, have been halting and have still not adequately addressed the underlying problems. ** EFSI resources are made up from a €26 billion guarantee funded from the European Union’s budget, complemented by €7.5 billion of the European Investment Bank’s capital.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

International Monetary Fund. King, M. (2006). Trusting in Money: From Kirkcaldy to the MPC. The Adam Smith Lecture. London: Bank of England. Kocherlakota, C. A. (2014). Internal debt crises and sovereign defaults. Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(S) , S68-S80. Koo, R. (2014). The Escape from Balance Sheet Recession and the QE Trap: A Hazardous Road for the World Economy. Wiley. Retrieved from http://www.eunews.it/docs/koo.pdf Luigi Buttiglione, P. R. (2014). Deleveraging? What Deleveraging? Geneva: International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies (ICMB). Michael McLeay, A. R. (2014). Money creation in the modern economy.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

There are, then, both specific and general channels within asset markets which link asset price inflation, credit growth and profitability. These make asset markets intrinsically unstable, this instability can lead to dangerously self-reinforcing cycles of boom and bust, and these can in turn inflict horrendous damage on the wider economy. This is exactly what happened in the 2008 crash. This was a ‘balance-sheet’ recession: not a recession of the more frequent and familiar kind, driven by falling profitability across the business cycle, but a fundamental shift in asset values, triggered by a collapse in the housing market and in due course spreading from the US and UK to affect much of the wider global economy.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

Those who say Britain should ease off on dealing with its debt, I think, are now on the margins of the debate.’ Mr Osborne made this remark at a time when his party had slumped in the polls after the disastrous 2012 Budget following the scrapping of the 50p tax rate. The poor performance of the economy, he said, was all down to the overhang of debt in the private sector, and the drawn-out ‘balance sheet recession’ that followed. So why did he follow the advice of his forecasters that the economy would be enjoying strong growth through this time? Britain was enduring the worst recovery in GDP terms on record. All of its main economic counterparts had regained the ground lost in the recession with ‘V-shaped’ recoveries.