2011-05-12
Barry Eichengreen om risk och nationalekonomisk teori
av Fredrik Stjernberg
Niclas Berggren refererar idag på sin blogg till en artikel av Barry Eichengreen om hur nationalekonomin kan komma att förändras i ljuset av de senaste årens finansiella turbulens.
The question is how we could have been so misguided. One interpretation, understandably popular given our current plight, is that the basic economic theory informing the actions of central bankers and regulators was fatally flawed. The only course left is to throw it out and start over. But another view, considerably closer to the truth, is that the problem lay not so much with the poverty of the underlying theory as with selective reading of it-a selective reading shaped by the social milieu. That social milieu encouraged financial decision makers to cherry-pick the theories that supported excessive risk taking. It discouraged whistle-blowing, not just by risk-management officers in large financial institutions, but also by the economists whose scholarship provided intellectual justification for the financial institutions’ decisions. The consequence was that scholarship that warned of potential disaster was ignored. And the result was global economic calamity on a scale not seen for four generations.
viaThe Last Temptation of Risk | The National Interest.
