Rudd’s essay is on the money

Flattr this!

Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter Kevin Rudd has fol­lowed up his cri­tique of neolib­er­al­ism with a new essay in the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald on the caus­es of the cri­sis, and the poli­cies need­ed after recov­ery.

With one excep­tion, his key expla­na­tions for the cri­sis are the same as those iden­ti­fied by myself and the hand­ful of oth­er econ­o­mists who pre­dict­ed this cri­sis before it hap­pened:

Bernanke an Expert on the Great Depression??

Flattr this!

Note: This post has been mod­i­fied ni the light of com­ments that the ini­tial ver­sion quot­ed Bernanke out of con­text.

A link to this blog from a US legal advi­so­ry web­site the Prac­tis­ing Law Insti­tute’s In Brief ( “DEFLATION IN THE REAL WORLD”) remind­ed me of  Bernanke’s book Essays on the Great Depres­sion, which I’ve been aware of for some time but have yet to read. I’ll make amends on that front ear­ly this year; for­tu­nate­ly, an extract from Chap­ter One is avail­able as a pre­view on the Prince­ton site (I could­n’t locate the promised eBook any­where!; in what fol­lows, when I quote Bernanke it is from the orig­i­nal jour­nal paper pub­lished in 1995, rather than this chap­ter).