Macroeconomics and Financial Crises - by Gary B Gorton & Guillermo L Ordoñez (Hardcover)

About the Book

"After the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes led the way in building a new macroeconomic framework to deal with that unprecedented economic reality. Ten years after our own crisis, however, macroeconomics has not come to terms with how to grapple with the idea of financial crises in its models. In the stylized world of macroeconomic theory, crises are not an inherent or structural element. Gary Gorton and Guillermo Ordonez, who were prominent experts to first authoritatively respond to the financial crisis of 2008 have since been working to understand what needs to change in macroeconomic models to incorporate and address financial crises. In this book Gorton and Ordonez provide an authoritative first step on how to rebuild macroeconomics in a way that can take into account financial crises, and they make a strong case that we need to rethink things at a fundamental level. In the book they bring together ten years of work on what needs to happen. Their two key ideas of what has missing are information and credit. More specifically, how information and credit interact, for example, when investors learn that certain types of debt aren't safe investments and we see bank runs. Gorton and Ordonez provide a way to model this interaction and a roadmap of how to incorporate it into a macroeconomic equilibrium"--

Book Synopsis

How financial crises are inherent features of macroeconomic dynamics

There are no bigger disruptions in the functioning of economies than financial crises. Yet prior to the crash of 2007-2008, macroeconomics incorporated financial crises simply as bad shocks, like earthquakes, failing to consider them as an intrinsic phenomenon of the evolution of macroeconomic variables, such as credit, investment, and productivity. Macroeconomics and Financial Crises rethinks how technological change, credit booms, and endogenous information production combine to generate financial crises as inherent and recurrent reactions to macroeconomic dynamics.

Gary Gorton and Guillermo Ordoñez identify short-term debt, collateral, and information as common elements that are present in all financial crises. Short-term debt is a critical element for storing value over short periods without fear of loss, but there needs to be collateral backing the debt. Critically, the collateral should be such that no agent wants to produce information about its quality. The debt backed by such collateral is information-insensitive. Gorton and Ordoñez argue that, during a credit boom, as more and more firms get loans, the economy reaches a tipping point where information production becomes too tempting, disrupting short-term debt and cutting most firms out of the credit market.

Showing how a financial crisis is an information event triggered by the dynamics of macroeconomic variables, Macroeconomics and Financial Crises provides new perspectives on the intricate relations between macroeconomics and financial crises.

About the Author

Gary B. Gorton is the Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management. His books include Slapped by the Invisible Hand and (with Ellis W. Tallman) Fighting Financial Crises. Guillermo L. Ordoñez is professor of economics and finance at the University of Pennsylvania and an editor of the Journal of Economic Theory.