IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedmep/17-1.html

The Great Recession: A Macroeconomic Earthquake

Author

Listed:
  • Lawrence J. Christiano

Abstract

The Great Recession was particularly severe and has endured far longer than most recessions. Economists now believe it was caused by a perfect storm of declining home prices, a financial system heavily invested in house-related assets and a shadow banking system highly vulnerable to bank runs or rollover risk. It has lasted longer than most recessions because economically damaged households were unwilling or unable to increase spending, thus perpetuating the recession by a mechanism known as the paradox of thrift. Economists believe the Great Recession wasn?t foreseen because the size and fragility of the shadow banking system had gone unnoticed. {{p}} The recession has had an inordinate impact on macroeconomics as a discipline, leading economists to reconsider two largely discarded theories: IS-LM and the paradox of thrift. It has also forced theorists to better understand and incorporate the financial sector into their models, the most promising of which focus on mismatch between the maturity periods of assets and liabilities held by banks.

Suggested Citation

  • Lawrence J. Christiano, 2017. "The Great Recession: A Macroeconomic Earthquake," Economic Policy Paper 17-1, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedmep:17-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/~/media/files/pubs/eppapers/17-1/the-great-recession-a-macroeconomic-earthquake.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gauti B. Eggertsson & Michael Woodford, 2003. "The Zero Bound on Interest Rates and Optimal Monetary Policy," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 34(1), pages 139-235.
    2. Gertler, M. & Kiyotaki, N. & Prestipino, A., 2016. "Wholesale Banking and Bank Runs in Macroeconomic Modeling of Financial Crises," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1345-1425, Elsevier.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hamed Ghiaie, 2018. "Shadow Bank run, Housing and Credit Market: The Story of a Recession," Thema Working Papers 2018-01, THEMA (Théorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), CY Cergy-Paris University, ESSEC and CNRS.
    2. Terrie Walmsley & Adam Rose & Dan Wei, 2021. "The Impacts of the Coronavirus on the Economy of the United States," Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Springer, vol. 5(1), pages 1-52, April.
    3. Ghiaie Hamed, 2020. "Shadow Bank Run, Housing and Credit Market: The Story of a Recession," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 20(2), pages 1-30, June.
    4. Brancaccio, Emiliano & Califano, Andrea & Lopreite, Milena & Moneta, Alessio, 2020. "Nonperforming loans and competing rules of monetary policy: A statistical identification approach," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 127-136.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin S. Eichenbaum & Mathias Trabandt, 2018. "On DSGE Models," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 32(3), pages 113-140, Summer.
    2. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95.
    3. Gürkaynak, Refet S. & Kısacıkoğlu, Burçin & Lee, Sang Seok, 2022. "Exchange rate and inflation under weak monetary policy: Turkey verifies theory," CFS Working Paper Series 679, Center for Financial Studies (CFS).
    4. Paustian, Matthias & Stoltenberg, Christian, 2008. "Optimal interest rate stabilization in a basic sticky-price model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 32(10), pages 3166-3191, October.
    5. Yoshito Funashima, 2022. "Economic policy uncertainty and unconventional monetary policy," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 90(3), pages 278-292, June.
    6. Toshiaki Ogawa & Masato Ubukata & Toshiaki Watanabe, 2020. "Stock Return Predictability and Variance Risk Premia around the ZLB," IMES Discussion Paper Series 20-E-09, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan.
    7. Pathberiya, Lasitha R.C., 2024. "Monetary policy rules and zero lower bound on nominal interest rates in a cost-channel economy," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    8. Darracq Pariès, Matthieu & Kühl, Michael, 2016. "The optimal conduct of central bank asset purchases," Working Paper Series 1973, European Central Bank.
    9. Christophe Blot & Jérôme Creel & Paul Hubert & Fabien Labondance, 2015. "The QE experience: Worth a try?," Post-Print hal-03459951, HAL.
    10. Ben S. Bernanke & Vincent R. Reinhart & Brian P. Sack, 2004. "Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound: An Empirical Assessment," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 35(2), pages 1-100.
    11. Koijen, Ralph S.J. & Koulischer, François & Nguyen, Benoît & Yogo, Motohiro, 2021. "Inspecting the mechanism of quantitative easing in the euro area," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 140(1), pages 1-20.
    12. S. Bogan Aruoba & Pablo Cuba-Borda & Kenji Higa-Flores & Frank Schorfheide & Sergio Villalvazo, 2021. "Piecewise-Linear Approximations and Filtering for DSGE Models with Occasionally Binding Constraints," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 41, pages 96-120, July.
    13. Benigno, Pierpaolo & Romei, Federica, 2014. "Debt deleveraging and the exchange rate," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(1), pages 1-16.
    14. Abdoulaye Millogo, 2020. "Hysteresis Effects and Macroeconomics Gains from Unconventional Monetary Policies Stabilization," Cahiers de recherche 20-12, Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke.
    15. Janet L. Yellen, 2015. "Inflation Dynamics and Monetary Policy : A speech at the Philip Gamble Memorial Lecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts, September 24, 2015," Speech 863, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    16. Mr. Daniel Leigh, 2005. "Estimating the Implicit Inflation Target: An Application to U.S. Monetary Policy," IMF Working Papers 2005/077, International Monetary Fund.
    17. Edward Nelson, 2020. "Seven Fallacies Concerning Milton Friedman's “The Role of Monetary Policy”," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 52(1), pages 145-164, February.
    18. Ferrante, Francesco, 2019. "Risky lending, bank leverage and unconventional monetary policy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 100-127.
    19. Taisuke Nakata & Hiroatsu Tanaka, 2020. "Equilibrium Yield Curves and the Interest Rate Lower Bound," CARF F-Series CARF-F-482, Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo.
    20. Nakata, Taisuke & Ogaki, Ryota & Schmidt, Sebastian & Yoo, Paul, 2019. "Attenuating the forward guidance puzzle: Implications for optimal monetary policy," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 90-106.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedmep:17-1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jannelle Ruswick The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Jannelle Ruswick to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cfrbmus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.