A Systemic Explanation for The 2008 Financial Crisis

In September of 2013, Francis Breedon organized a Round Table discussion at the Money Macro Finance Conference held at Queen Mary College London. The session included myself, Chris Giles of the Financial Times and David Miles of the Monetary Policy Committee as speakers and Sushil Wadwhani as moderator.  Our topic: the Bank of England's remit.

Chris and David chose to speak about monetary policy and the role of the Monetary Policy Committee.  I chose, instead, to focus on the task that faces the newly formed Bank of England's  Financial Policy Committee.  This post will focus on one of the points I made in my talk, the distinction between what I call institutional and systemic explanations of the 2008 financial crisis.  My complete argument is published in a forthcoming paper "Financial Stability and the Role of the Financial Policy Committee", that will appear in The Manchester School.

Recent events have generated widespread consensus that the financial markets are not working as they should. But there is little agreement as to why. One explanation is that financial frictions can sometimes become more disruptive than usual and these frictions can be corrected by regulating financial institutions. An alternative explanation that I have promoted in my own work, is that financial markets do not allocate capital efficiently.  The failure of financial markets occurs because people who will be born in the future cannot trade in current markets. I call this the absence of prenatal financial markets.

The financial frictions view leads to an institutional explanation for financial crises. The absence of prenatal financial markets view leads to the systemic explanation. Quoting from my forthcoming paper...

Distinguishing the institutional from the systemic explanation of financial crises affects the way we respond. If the problem is institutional we should design regulations that help overcome the financial frictions that prevent our banks, insurance companies and pension funds from performing their appropriate roles as intermediaries. If the problem is systemic, the failure of institutions is a symptom and new regulations are analogous to putting an Elastoplast on a gunshot wound.

The consensus amongst economists in the U.K. and the U.S. is that the 2008 financial crisis that led to the Great Recession was an institutional failure. The response has been the passage of the Financial Services Act in the U.K. and the Dodd‐Frank Act in the U.S.; legislation that is designed to regulate the financial services industry. I believe that the consensus is mistaken; the problem is not institutional; it is systemic.

Let me be clear. I am not arguing that existing financial institutions were blameless. Nor am I arguing that the regulatory framework was effective. The crisis has taught us that the design of effective regulation matters: and it matters a lot. I agree wholeheartedly with Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig who argue forcefully that we need much higher capital requirements. Regulating existing institutions is necessary: but we can and should do much more. Quoting again from my forthcoming paper...

... If I am right, and the problem is systemic, regulating our existing institutions will not solve the problem [of preventing future financial crises]. It will lead to the creation of new institutions, shadow‐banks, shadow insurance companies and shadow pension funds; unregulated institutions that will be created to facilitate the trades that willing lenders and willing borrowers want to engage in. Dodd‐Frank and the Financial Services Act cannot prevent the next financial crisis any more than King Canute could prevent the movement of the tides.

...When the next financial crisis occurs, and it will occur, do not blame the members of the Financial Policy Committee. They are guard dogs without teeth. It’s time to move beyond empty rhetoric by giving to the FPC, the tools that will enable it to deliver what is requested of it. If we truly want financial stability; we must act to stabilise markets. 

If you want to read more, you will find a working paper version of the article here where I also explain what tools we should give to the FPC to maintain future financial stability.

Animal Spirits: an Empirical Test

Christian Zimmerman draws attention to a new paper by Paolo Gelain and Marco Guerrazi, "A demand-driven search model with self-fulfilling expectations: The new ‘Farmerian’ framework under scrutiny" 

Here is the abstract from the paper

In this paper, we implement Bayesian econometric techniques to analyze a theoretical framework built along the lines of Farmer’s micro-foundation of the General Theory. Specifically, we test the ability of a demand-driven search model with self-fulfilling expectations to match the behaviour of the US economy over the last thirty years. The main findings of our empirical investigation are the following. First, all over the period, our model fits data very well. Second, demand shocks are the most relevant in explaining the variability of concerned variables. In addition, our estimates reveal that a large negative demand shock caused the Great Recession via a sudden drop of confidence. Overall, those results are consistent with the main features of the New ‘Farmerian’ Economics as well as to latest demand-side explanations of the finance-induced recession.

In Christian's words...

Roger Farmer’s recent work has been causing quite a stir, especially as it seems to validate some the things that happened during the recent crisis. This paper provides an empirical test of Farmer’s theory and shows that he is indeed onto something.

Christian's website was set up to promote discussion of research on DSGE models and he invites visitors to leave comments on the papers he highlights. Thanks Christian, for drawing attention to this very interesting piece.

New Keynesian Flimflam

Simon Wren-Lewis, seeks a serious debate with our heterodox colleagues, and judging by the excellent comment thread that appears on his post, there are plenty of heterodox economists who are ready and willing to take up the challenge. This is a welcome debate.

Simon defends his view of orthodoxy, by which he means New Keynesian economics. In its simplest form, New Keynesian economics is a three-equation model that explains the behavior of the nominal interest rate, the "output gap" and the inflation rate.

I agree firmly with Simon, that from a policy perspective, we should not care one iota if NK economics has anything to do with what Keynes might or might not have thought. But from the perspective of the history of thought, we should not mislead our students with false labels. The New Keynesian model is neither new nor Keynesian. It is a beautiful formalization of David Hume's verbal argument in his 1742 essay "Of Money"; an early piece on the Quantity Theory of Money  that every macroeconomics student should read at least once.

Let me take up just one point from Simon's post. Are the demand and supply of labor always equal and should we care?

In the NK model, the answer to this question is YES: the demand and supply of labor are always equal. There is no involuntary unemployment as defined in the General Theory. Why does that matter?

The notion of continuous market clearing adds a mechanism to the NK model that works to restore full employment through wage and price adjustment. That mechanism is the basis for the NK Phillips curve which asserts that prices will rise whenever output is above potential. Since potential output cannot be independently measured, that assertion becomes a tautological definition of the output gap.

The NK economist accepts Milton Friedman's concept of the natural rate of unemployment which asserts that, in the long run, there is a unique equilibrium level of unemployment associated with stable inflationary expectations. If inflation appears, following a recession, a policy maker who accepts NK economics will infer that the economy is operating above potential. If unemployment is now 6%, rather than 3%, it must be that the natural rate of unemployment has increased.

If the NRH hypothesis is wrong, as I have argued here, the NK policy maker will allow the economy to operate permanently below its long-run potential and society will suffer permanent non-recoverable losses in output. 

Orthodox economics is not homogenous nor is it static. It evolves in response to historical events like the Great Depression and the 2008 Financial Crisis.  Now is a good time for all of us to be open to new ideas.

How the Economy Works

The first paperback English language edition of my book How the Economy Works has just been published by Oxford University Press.  I hope this edition finds a new audience that will take the time to consider the ideas I present.  The book provides, not only a history of contemporary economic thought, but also some fresh ideas for dealing with financial crises and for the design of a new financial architecture to prevent them from reoccurring.

Here are a few excerpts from the new Preface.

How the Economy Works, (HTEW) first appeared in 2010. By the time of its publication, the world was in the throes of the worst recession since the 1930s. Thirty-seven months after the NBER called the recession over, in June of 2009, the U.S. economy is still a long way from regaining all of the jobs lost during the crisis. I wrote this book to help you understand why this happened and to offer some new ideas to prevent similar financial crises from reoccurring in the future.

I am often asked if economics is a science. My response is very much yes. Economics is a science: but it is not an empirical science. The task of an economist is a bit like that of a team of research chemists. Imagine that the chemists are asked to identify an unknown substance subject to some rather unusual constraints. First, they can conduct no more than three experiments a century and second, as the team members change, new members are not permitted to read the research notes of their predecessors.

The experiments of economics are large disruptive events, like the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s or the Great Recession of 2008. The research notes of our predecessors are the writings of the great economists who preceded us; writings that are no longer read by graduate students in economics who have been taught that economic history and the history of thought are unnecessary distractions from the business of building mathematical models grounded in rigorous theory.

All this needs to change. It is my hope, that by providing an introduction to the historical evolution of economic ideas, this book will encourage a few new minds to delve more deeply into the ideas that formed our subject

Since How the Economy Works first appeared in print, I have written more than thirty op ed pieces in the Financial Times, on Project Syndicate, VoxEU and on other blogs and media outlets. Those pieces are linked electronically on my website www.rogerfarmer.com. Many of them remained as top five or top ten most popular posts on the Financial Times Economists’ Forum for many months and some are still there as I write this preface. 

Collectively, these op eds present a coherent account of the Great Recession as it unfolded, beginning in 2009, when I was one of the first, if not the first, to mention the word Depression as a possible outcome following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September of 2008. 

Economic literacy is as important to citizenship as literacy in mathematics and the physical sciences. It is more important than ever that we all understand how economic theory influences the policies that are having such a profound impact on our everyday lives. I hope that this reissue of HTEW in a, paperback edition, will contribute to that goal and that some of the new ideas I have provided will resonate, with you, the reader.

Teaching Economics

Students at the University of Manchester in England are unhappy with the way they are being taught and they are not alone. In a widely publicized, and highly articulate report, the Post-Crash Economics Society, a group of Manchester Univesity students, is highly critical of "business as usual" in the economics curriculum in the wake of the crisis.

There is much to agree with in their arguments.


Among the criticisms that the students level at the curriculum are these

1. The absence of classes on the history of thought
2. No classes on ethics
3. A narrow focus on neoclassical economics to the exclusion of alternative perspectives
4. Little or no economic history

I agree with much of this and there is wide agreement amongst teachers of economics that change is needed as reflected in the published  Bank of England Conference volume, organized and edited by Diane Coyle. As I argued at that conference, it is a mistake to neglect the teaching of economic history and the history of thought.  But; beware of what you wish for.

Economics is a science. Our data comes from the natural experiments thrown at us by large disruptive events like the Great Depression, the 1970s stagflation and, most recently, the Great Recession.  It is the task of economic historians to familiarize their students with the facts.  It is the task of historians of thought to illuminate their students with the insights from the economists who preceded us.

What of eclecticism in the choice of topics? Should we teach a neoclassical approach to the exclusion of all else?  Probably not. But the core approach to modern economics, both macro and micro, is the culmination of a process of intellectual argument in which ideas have been sifted, debated and compared with facts. Some have survived; others have not.

When Marx wrote Capital, his economics incorporated Ricardo's labor theory of value, a centerpiece of the mainstream economics of his day. The labor theory of value was jettisoned by mainstream economics when the theory of marginal utility was introduced by, among others, the Manchester based economist Stanley Jevons. Marginal utility was an advance over the labor theory of value, which is no longer taught in mainstream courses. 

In the 1980s, there was tremendous interest in the idea that the mathematics of chaos theory could help us to understand business cycles. Chaos theory, had already proven successful in the natural sciences where it is used to explain fluid dynamics. At a conference in Paris in the early 1980's, Buz Brock, an economist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, convinced many of us that there is just not enough data for that idea to help explain business cycles.  Chaos theory never did become part of the mainstream curriculum in economics.

In a twenty year period following the Great Depression,  Keynesian economics dominated the teaching of macroeconomics.  The central idea in The General Theory is that capitalist economies are not self-stabilizing. That idea was lost to mainstream economics when Franco Modigliani and Paul Samuelson synthesized Keynesian ideas with neoclassical thought.  The idea that capitalist economies are not self-stabilizing survived in Post-Keynesian economics and is now being reintegrated into the mainstream in my own recent work.

There is a reason why economic thought moves slowly. It is our inability to conduct experiments. If every new idea led to the creation of a new school of thought, the proliferation of ideas would overwhelm our ability to absorb and synthesize existing ones.

On Page 23 of their report, the Manchester students cite John Stuart Mill

"He who knows only his own side of the case doesn’t know much about it. His reasons may be good, and no-one may have been able to refute them; but if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, and doesn’t even know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.” 

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

My advice to students is this. Continue to question everything you are taught. Lobby for classes on alternative approaches: But also take the time to absorb those ideas that are in the mainstream. The very best mainstream economists were the radical students who questioned authority when they were undergraduates. It is those economists who you must engage if you are to make meaningful changes that will advance our understanding. That takes hard work, perseverance, and patience.