Could not connect to Amazon
Product Description
Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance: Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm: Books. Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini: Author One-to-One In this Amazon exclusive, we brought together authors Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini and asked them to interview each other. Ian Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group, the world's leading global political risk research and consulting firm. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, and other publications, and his books include The End of the Free Market, The J Curve, and The Fat Tail. Read on to see Ian Bremmer's questions for Nouriel Roubini, or turn the tables to see what Roubini asked Bremmer. Bremmer: You argue in your book [Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance] that financial crises are not unpredictable “black swan” events but, rather, can be forecast – in effect, white swans. What do you mean by that? Roubini: My friend Nassim Taleb popularized the concept of “Black Swans,” those economic and financial events that are sudden, unexpected and unpredictable. But if you look at financial crises through history – and the earliest is the Tulipmania in the Netherlands in the 17th Century – you see a pattern that is highly regular and predictable: An asset bubble – often in real estate or in stock markets or in a new industry – leads to financial euphoria, excessive risk taking, an accumulation of excessive debt and leverage. So the signposts of this phase — asset boom and bubble, followed by the eventual bust and crash — are highly predictable if one looks at the economic and financial indicators that show the build-up of such excesses. Thus, financial boom and bust are predictable white swan events, not unpredictable and random black swans. Financial crises have repeatedly occurred for hundreds of years and they follow quite regular pattern. That is why my book is about “crisis economics”, a phenomenon that is becoming more of a rule than an exception. Financial crises that should have occurred once in 100 years now occur more frequently and with greater virulence than in the past; and their economic, fiscal, financial and social costs are rising. The trouble is that in the bubble phase nearly everyone, the exception being a few critical analysts, is swept in a delusional bubble mania of irrational euphoria: households, financial institutions, investors, governments, spinmeisters all of whom profit from the bubble, including Ponzi-schemers who concoct their houses of cards and financial con games. So, in each bubble there are cranks who argue that this time is different and that the bubble is driven by a fundamental brave new world of ever rising growth and profits. Then, when the boom and bubble turns into a bust and crash, a reality check occurs and financial depression sets in. Bremmer: Who is to blame the most for the recent financial crisis? Who were the culprits of the latest one? Roubini Roubini (Bailouts or Bail-ins), a professor of economics at NYU, was greeted with skepticism when he warned a 2006 meeting of the IMF that a deep recession was imminent. Along with economics historian Mihm, (A Nation of Counterfeiters) Roubini provides an in-depth analysis of the role of crises in capitalist economies from a historical perspective. With thumbnail sketches of nineteenth and twentieth century economic thought from Smith, Keynes, and others, they provide a context for understanding financial markets and the ways in which bankers and politicians relate to them. The authors also offer a theoretical context for understanding the current economic crisis and for using it as an object lesson... in how to foresee them, prevent them, weather them, and clean up after them. Dismissing the quaint beliefs that markets are self-regulating, they take issue with the simplistic populist assumption that the present crisis was caused by greed or something as inconsequential as subprime mortgages. They blame Alan Greenspan's refusal to use the power of the Fed to dampen unbridled speculation, choosing instead to pump vast quantities of easy money into the economy and keep it there for too long. This will be a useful guide for readers attempting to get a handle on the present crisis. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
|
(
) 
