Afternoon Must-Read: Nick Bunker: Are recoveries from Financial Crises Always Slow?

Scooped by Nick Bunker! Well, that post can now go in the trash!

Nick Bunker: Are Recoveries from Financial Crises Always Slow?: “A form of conventional wisdom has developed in the years since the beginning of the Great Recession about financial crises…

…When economies go through major systemic failures of their financial systems the ensuing economic recoveries will invariably be tepid and prolonged. This view is based primarily on research by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff…. Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer… is a refinement of those analyses… focused specifically on financial crises in rich economies in the latter half of the 20th century…. Very large financial crises… Sometimes, as in the case of Japan, the crisis leads to significant recessions and slow recoveries. And sometimes, such as with Norway in the early 1990s, the effect was pretty much non-existent…. A large financial crisis doesn’t necessarily mean a large economic downturn has to happen. Economic events aren’t forces that sweep over us, but things that we can react to and very possibly control.


Paul Krugman (January 2008): Deep? Maybe. Long? Probably: “The last two recessions were… followed by prolonged ‘jobless recoveries’ that felt like continuing recessions….

…There’s every reason to think that the same thing will happen this time…. The 1990-91 recession was brought on by a credit crunch, the 2001 recession by overinvestment; this time we’ve got both. I guess we’ll see. In any case, whatever happens will probably last quite a while.

Christina Romer and David Romer: New Evidence on the Impact of Financial Crises in Advanced Countries: “In the four decades before the Great Recession… financial distress in 24 OECD countries for the period 1967–2007….

…based on assessments of the health of countries’ financial systems from a consistent, real-time narrative source…. We find that output declines following financial crises in modern advanced countries are highly variable, on average only moderate, and often temporary. One important driver of the variation in outcomes across crises appears to be the severity and persistence of the financial distress itself.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff: Recovery from Financial Crises: Evidence from 100 Episodes: “100 systemic banking crises [since 1857] reveals that a significant part of the costs of these crises lies in the protracted and halting nature of the recovery….

…Five to six years after the onset of the current crisis only Germany and the United States… have reached their 2007–2008 peaks in per capita income…. The sub-prime crisis is not an anomaly in the context of the pre-WWII era. Postwar business cycles are not the right comparator for the severe crises that have swept advanced economies in recent years….

Even after one of the most severe multi-year crises on record in the advanced economies, the received wisdom in policy circles clings to the notion that high-income countries are completely different from their emerging-market counterparts… growth, financial stability, and debt sustainability can be achieved through a mix of austerity and forbearance (and some reform). The claim is that advanced countries do not need to resort to the more eclectic policies of… debt restructurings and con- versions, higher inflation, capital controls, and other forms of financial repression.

Now entering the sixth or seventh year (depending on the country) of crisis, output remains well below its pre-crisis peak in ten of the twelve crisis countries. The gap with potential output is even greater. Delays in accepting that desperate times call for desperate measures keeps raising the odds that, as documented here, this crisis may in the end surpass in severity the depression of the 1930s in a large number of countries.

Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, Alan M. Taylor: The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles: “The share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century….

…Financial stability risks have been increasingly linked to real estate lending booms which are typically followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries.” |

Sovereigns versus Banks: Credit, Crises, and Consequences: In advanced countries since 1870… significant financial stability risks have mostly come from private sector credit booms rather than from the expansion of public debt. However… high levels of public debt have tended to exacerbate the effects of private sector deleveraging after crises…. (i) In a normal recession and recovery real GDP per capita falls by 1.5 percent and takes only 2 years to regain its previous peak, but in a financial crisis recession the drop is typically 5 percent and it takes over 5 years to regain the previous peak; (ii) the output drop is even worse and recovery even slower when the crisis is preceded by a credit boom; and (iii) the path of recovery is worse still when a credit-fueled crisis coincides with elevated public debt levels…. Fiscal space appears to be a constraint in the aftermath of a crisis, then and now.”

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Betting the House: “loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We exploit the implications of the macroeconomic policy trilemma to identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions: countries with fixed exchange regimes often see fluctuations in short-term interest rates unrelated to home economic conditions. We use novel instrumental variable local projection methods to demonstrate that loose monetary conditions lead to booms in real estate lending and house prices bubbles; these, in turn, materially heighten the risk of financial crises. Both effects have become stronger in the postwar era.

March 18, 2015

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