From Financial Crisis to Stagnation
The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economics
The US economy today is confronted with the prospect of extended stagnation. This book
explores why.
Thomas I. Palley argues that the Great Recession and destruction of shared prosperity
is due to flawed economic policy over the past thirty years. One flaw was the growth model
adopted after 1980 that relied on debt and asset price inflation to fuel growth instead of
wages. A second flaw was the model of globalization that created an economic gash.
Financial deregulation and the house price bubble kept the economy going by making ever
more credit available. As the economy cannibalized itself by undercutting income
distribution and accumulating debt, it needed larger speculative bubbles to grow. That
process ended when the housing bubble burst.
The book explains why the economy is now confronted with stagnation rather than the
quick recovery predicted by other accounts.
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I. Origins of the Great Recession:
1. Goodbye financial crash, hello stagnation
2. The tragedy of bad ideas
3. Overview: three perspectives on the crisis
4. America's exhausted paradigm: macroeconomic causes of the crisis
5. The role of finance
6. Myths and fallacies about the crisis: stories about the domestic economy
7. Myths and fallacies about the crisis: stories about the international economy
Part II. Avoiding a Great Stagnation:
8. The coming Great Stagnation
9. Avoiding a Great Stagnation: rethinking the paradigm
10. The challenge of corporate globalization
11. Economists and the crisis: bad ideas revisited
12. Markets and the common good: time for a great rebalancing.
256 pages, Hardcover