International Law

Eichengreen on the Financial Crisis

By Stan

Along with everyone else, I have been reading countless articles and political diatribes on the U.S./global economic crisis. This is not entirely a new set of circumstances, so a lot of this stuff is familiar. However, for someone who is not a finance guy, I can get lost in the tall grass pretty quick.

The following article by Barry Eichengreen is one of the best I’ve read so far in explaining what the heck is going on, where things are headed, and what the international consequences are. Insofar as the article contains a lot of macro and some law, it’s safely in my comfort zone. Link to the full article follows the intro quote:

Getting out of our current financial mess requires understanding how we got into it in the first place. The dominant explanation, voiced by figures as diverse as Thomas Friedman and John McCain, is that the fundamental cause was greed and corruption on Wall Street. Though not one to deny the existence of base motives in the institutional investor community, I would insist that the crisis has roots in key policy decisions stretching back over more than three decades.

Anatomy of the Financial Crisis

Full post as published by China Hearsay on September 23, 2008 (boomark / email).