This is from David Warsh (note that, despite Dodd-Frank and other regulatory measures instituted since the financial crises,we are still susceptible to the shadow bank run problems described below):
What Really Happened - Economic Principals: ...the best economics book on the
fall calendar ... (to be published next month) is a slender account about
the circumstances that led to that near meltdown in September 2008, and an
explanation of why they were not apparent until the last moment.
Misunderstanding Financial Crises: Why We Don’t See Them Coming (Oxford
University Press), by Gary Gorton, of Yale University’s School of Management ... can be viewed as an answer to the question famously
posed to their advisers, in slightly different ways, by both
George W.
Bush and
Queen
Elizabeth: why was there no warning of a calamity that was warded off only
at such great expense? The answer is that, lulled by nearly 75 years without
one, economists had become convinced that banking panics had become a thing of
the past. The book is probably better understood as the successor to Charles P.
Kindleberger’s 1977 classic, since updated many times,
Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. This time,
I think, the message won’t be brushed aside.
Not that building the near-certainty of periodic crises back into economics’
analytic framework will be easy. Gorton is an economic historian by training,
and the economists with whom he collaborates mostly have monetary, financial or
organizational backgrounds. This means they are up against macroeconomics, one
of the most powerful guilds in ... virtually all of macro, from Edward Prescott
on the right to Olivier Blanchard on the left, in the form of models of that
describe economies in terms of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE).
More on that in a moment.
But Gorton, 61, possesses several advantages that
Kindleberger
(1910-2003) did not. He is an expert on banking, for one thing. (Kindleberger
specialized in the international monetary system.) He’s mathematically adroit,
for another, a quant. Most significantly, he is an insider, the economist whose
models and product concepts were at the heart of insurance giant AIG’s Financial
Products unit, whose undoing amid a stampede of competing claims was one of the
central events of the crisis. As such, he had a front row seat.
Gorton’s case is ostensibly simple. Where there are banking systems, he
says, there will be periodic runs on them, episodes in which everyone tries to
turn his claim into cash at the same time. He sets out the pattern this way:
- Crises have happened throughout the history of market economies.
- They are about demands for cash in exchange for bank debt — debt which
takes many different forms, not just retail deposits.
- The demands for cash are on such a scale – often the whole banking
system is run on – that it is not possible to meet those demands, because
the assets of the banking system cannot be sold en masse without their
prices plummeting.
- Crises are sudden, unpredictable events, although the level of fragility
may be observable.
- Crises, when they occur, may be contained, panics halted, but only at
enormous cost.
- Preventing depression means saving the banks and bankers. As Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner put it: “what feels just and fair is the opposite
of what’s required for a just and fair outcome.”
The problem is that, starting in the 1970s, many economists convinced
themselves that bank runs were something they no longer had to worry about, or
even think about. They thought because the measures implemented during the Great
Depression – deposit insurance, careful segregation of banks by line of
business, and close supervision – had ushered in what Gorton calls “the quiet
period.” Between 1934 and 2007 there were no financial crises in the
United States. (Expensive as it was, the savings and loan debacle of the late
1980s and early ’90s, doesn’t meet the definition of a crisis. Some 750 of
around 3,200 institutions failed, in slow motion, over a period of several
years, but there was no run on any of them, because depositors expected that the
government would make them whole.)
It was in these years that new models began taking over macroeconomics. These
new models are said to be dynamic, because in them things change over time;
stochastic, because the system is seen to respond to periodic shocks, factors
whose origins economists don’t try to explain as part of their system, at least
not yet; and general equilibrium, because everything in them is interdependent:
a change in one thing causes changes in everything else. Best of all, such
models are set to rest on supposedly secure
microfoundations,
meaning the unit of analysis is the individual or firm. One trouble was that no
one had succeeded in building banking or transactions technology into such a
model (though some economists had begun to try). Another was that the
behavioral aspects of those microfoundations were anything but secure.
It turns out the villain in the DSGE approach is the S term, for
stochastic processes,
meaning a view of the economy as probabilistic system ... as opposed to a deterministic one... It is ... when
economists begin to speak of
shocks that
matters become hazy. Shocks of various sorts have been familiar to
economists ever since the 1930s, when the Ukrainian statistician Eugen Slutsky
introduced the idea of sudden and unexpected concatenations of random events as
perhaps a better way of thinking about the sources of business cycles than the
prevailing view of too-good-a-time-at-the punch-bowl as the underlying
mechanism.
But it was only after 1983, when Edward Prescott and Finn Kydland introduced
a stylized model with which shocks of various sorts might be employed to explain
business fluctuations, that the stochastic approach took over macroeconomics.
The pair subsequently won a Nobel Prize, for this and other work. (All
this is explained with a reasonable degree of clarity in an article the two
wrote for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 1990,
Business Cycles: Real Facts and a Monetary Myth). Where there had been only
supply shocks and demand shocks before, now there were various real shocks,
unexpected and unpredictable changes in technologies, say, or preferences for
work and leisure, that might explain different economic outcomes that were
observed. Before long, there were even “rare economic disaster” shocks
that could explain the equity premium and other perennial mysteries.
That the world economy received a “shock” when US government policy reversed
itself in September 2008 and permitted Lehman Brothers to fail: what kind of an
explanation is that? Meanwhile, the shadow banking industry, a vast
collection of financial intermediaries that included money market funds,
investment banks, insurance companies and hedge funds, had grown to cycle and
recycle (at some sort of rate of interest) the enormous sums of money that
accrued as the world globalized. Finally, there was uncertainty, doubt, fear,
and then panic. These institutions began running on each other. No
depositors standing on sidewalks – only traders staring dumbfounded at comport
screens.
Only a theory beats another theory, of course. And the theory of financial
crises has a long, long way to go before it is expressed in carefully-reasoned
models and mapped into the rest of what we think we know about the behavior of
the world economy. Gorton’s book is full of intriguing insights, including
a critique of President’s Obama response to the crisis, and glimpses of a pair
of reforms that might have put the banking system back on its feet much more
quickly had they been widely briefed and better understood:
federally charter a new kind of narrowly-funded bank required to purchase any
and all securitized assets; and regulate repo (the interest-bearing repurchase
agreements through which financial giants created the shadow banking system), to
the extent that there would be limits on how much non-banks could issue (a
proposal recently defeated at the Securities and Exchange Commission after
massive lobbying by the money-market funds).
There is going to be a long slow reception to Misunderstanding Financial
Crises. Let’s see how it rolls out. I’ll return to the topic frequently
in the coming months.
,
).
(Stephen Thornton has a very nice
);
so does William Newton-Smith (
),
and much of the philosophy of science that has proceeded under the rubrics of
philosophy of physics, biology, or economics is equally attentive to the
specific epistemic practices of real working scientific traditions. So "falsifiability"
doesn't seem to have a lot to add to a theory of scientific rationality at this
point in the philosophy of science. In particular, Popper's grand critique of
Marx's social science on the grounds that it is "unfalsifiable" just seems to
miss the point; surely Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, or Tocqueville have
important social science insights that can't be refuted by deriding them as "unfalsifiable".
And Popper's impatience with Marxism makes one doubt his objectivity as a
sympathetic reader of Marx's work.
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