Quotes

From This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, Princeton, 2009, 

If there is one common theme to the vast range of crises we consider in this book, it is that excessive debt accumulation, whether it be by the government, banks, corporations, or consumers, often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom. xxv

Although private debt certainly plays a key role in many crises, government debt is far more often the underlying problem across the wide range of financial crises we examine. xxxiii

Severe financial crises rarely occur in isolation. Rather than being the trigger of recession, they are more often an amplification mechanism: a reversal of fortunes in output growth leads to a string of defaults on bank loans, forcing a pullback on other bank lending, which leads to further output falls and repayment problems, and so on. 145

[I]nflation has long been the weapon of choice in sovereign defaults of domestic debt and, where possible, on international debt. 175

Evergreening

I learned a new term today, evergreening, in an post about Japanese banks. The author, James Surowiecki asks why the Japanese banks were not able to earn their way out of trouble in the 1990s and his answer is that they evergreened:

The real answer is that Japan’s banks kept rolling over bad loans to weak borrowers. As this paper by Joe Peek and Eric Rosengreen shows, during the nineteen-nineties, Japanese banks constantly “evergreened”—they kept extending additional credit to companies that already had loans with them. By extending credit, the banks enabled weak corporate borrowers to keep making their interest payments, and to put off bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy is an underappreciated but necessary component of a market economy.

The big three

Megan McArdle writes about the auto bailout and why the big three are the disasters that they are, and also about the potential mess of the Madoff fraud.