Summary
Richard Koo: The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics
Lessons from Japan's Great Recession
The global financial crisis and economic collapse of 2009 heightened fears that the next Great Depression could be just around the corner. Although policymakers around the world have used everything in their power to fight the recession, they have so far failed to catch any momentum in their intentions.
In this particular case, it seems that lessons cannot be so easily learned from the past. After more than seven decades, the economics profession still has no answer to the question of how the depression of the 1930s was so severe and so long-lasting. Ben S. Bernanke, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (FED), called success in understanding the Great Depression the "Holy Grail of Macroeconomics".
In this epoch-making book, R. Koo believes that the Great Recession of Japan from 1990 to 2005 gave us valuable suggestions not only about how an economy after the bursting of a bubble can fall into a long-term recession, in which conventional economic policy measures will lose all effectiveness, but also about a precisely defined set of economic measures necessary to get such an economy out of this form of recession.
He believes that there are actually two phases of the economy, the ordinary (or yang) phase, in which the private sector maximizes profits, and the post-bubble (or yin) phase, in which the private sector minimizes profits or repairs damage in its balance sheets. Although conventional economics is useful in analyzing yang-phase economies, it is less effective in explaining phenomena such as the "liquidity trap" typical of yin-phase economies. The difference between the yin and yang phases also explains why some policies work well in some situations but not in others. Indeed, it offers a crucial grounding in macroeconomics that we have lacked since the days of Keynes.
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.