Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis (Hoover Institution Press Publication) - Hardcover

Taylor, John B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817949712 ISBN 13: 9780817949716

Publisher: Hoover Institution Press, 2009

Synopsis

In this concise volume, leading economist John B. Taylor offers empirical research to explain what caused the current financial crisis, what prolonged it, and what dramatically worsened it more than a year after it began. The evidence he presents strongly suggests that specific government actions and interventions are largely to blame and that any future government interventions must be based on a clearly stated diagnosis of the problem and a rationale for the interventions.

About this title

About the Author:

John B. Taylor is the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University.

Review:

If Milton Friedman and I had written as persuasive an analysis as this, one year—rather than 30 years—after the Great Depression began, the United States might have had a typical recession rather than the greatest downturn in history.

- Anna Schwartz, author, with Milton Friedman, of The Great Contraction, 1929–1933

Big problems confront us, and responses of immense size are on the table. We desperately need a solid and fact-based analysis so that we get the prescription right. John Taylor provides just that. A must-read for everyone involved.

- George Shultz, former secretary of Treasury, State, and Labor and Budget Director

This short volume does a masterful job of tracking the stunning financial market and macroeconomic events of 2007 and 2008, and it provides an organizing framework that will enable the specialist and novice alike to examine these events in a coherent setting.

- James Poterba, Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT and President and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research

John Taylor is one of the very few who points out the errors that the Federal Reserve made during this difficult period and also shows how they could avoid them. Members of Congress should read this book instead of looking for scapegoats in the wrong places.

- Allan Meltzer, author of The History of the Federal Reserve

...cogent, thorough and compelling...Taylor sums up his argument in his subtitle: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis. Take a moment to absorb that. Although we're told every day that the crisis arose from failures in the free markets—that it represents a crisis of capitalism itself--an eminent economist has now stepped forward to say, in effect, "Nonsense." The markets didn't fail, Taylor argues, the government did.

- Peter Robinson, What Caused the Crisis? Forbes.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0817949712
• ISBN 13: 9780817949716
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 92