Archive: Publikationen

Andreas Hoffmann; Gunther Schnabl

Abstract

The business cycles theories of Wicksell (1898), Schumpeter (1912), Mises (1912), Hayek (1929, 1935) and Minsky (1986, 1992) explain business cycles by distorted prices on capital markets, buoyant credit expansion and overinvestment. The exuberance during the boom endogenously causes the subsequent slump. While these theories put the emphasis on explaining the emergence of the cycle, this paper focuses on the macroeconomic policy responses during and after the crisis, when panic tightens credit supply. The paper allows an assessment of the long-term consequences of an asymmetric monetary and fiscal policy response to financial crisis.

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Andreas Hoffmann; Gunther Schnabl

Abstract

We show how since the mid 1980s expansionary monetary policies in the large economies and vagabonding liquidity have contributed to bubbles in the new and emerging markets. Based on the monetary overinvestment theories of Hayek and Wicksell we describe a wave of bubbles and crises that was initiated in Japan by an expansionary monetary policy in the mid 1980s. After the burst of the Japanese bubble and sharply declining interest rates in Japan, carry trade transmitted the bubbles to East Asia (Asian crisis) and the new markets in the developed economies. After the end of the irrational exuberance in the new markets, new bubbles emerged in the US real estate market and possibly currently in China and Central and Eastern Europe. Because particularly Japan and the US have tended to lower interest rates in response to financial crisis, the low interest rate policies in the large countries and thereby speculative exaggerations may continue. According to Wicksell and Hayek a higher level of interest rates in the large countries would reveal the structural distortions that have come along with the ample liquidity supply.

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