Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The New York Press book is a compilation of popular accounts of the crises assembled by the press. There are poems, jokes and articles about those pre-Civil War crises – there is everything here. They were correct in putting the 1837 and 1857 panics on the cover as they were the important panics prior to the Civil War.
I get the impression from your selection that financial crises aren’t unusual?
Yes. The idea of the selection is that most people are very unfamiliar with financial crises. There might be some older people who lived through the Great Depression but they would have been children at the time. Today’s crisis seems like a unique event, but in the US and in the UK crises were very common events. The idea here is to try to show people that we have a history of these things and a history of similar responses. There is a structural reason for crises: banks create very useful liabilities (like checks and repo), but they are vulnerable to runs.
The New York Press book is a compilation of popular accounts of the crises assembled by the press. There are poems, jokes and articles about those pre-Civil War crises – there is everything here. They were correct in putting the 1837 and 1857 panics on the cover as they were the important panics prior to the Civil War. So, this book was written after 1857, looking back and saying: ‘Look! We’ve had all these other panics – 1690, 1748, 1780…’ The idea is similar in a way to my idea – pointing out the precedents in history.
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Gary B Gorton is an American economist and Professor of Management and Finance at Yale University. He is a former member of the Moody’s Investors Services Academic Advisory Panel and former director of the research programme on banks and the economy for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He has taught at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and previously worked as an economist and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. During 1994 he was the Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. He has been a member of the New York Federal Reserve Bank Financial Advisory Roundtable since January 2009. He is an expert in stock and futures markets, banking and asset pricing. He has been an editor of The Review of Economic Studies.
