Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis by John Taylor

From the Publisher

Throughout history, financial crises have always been caused by excesses--frequently monetary excesses--which lead to a boom and an inevitable bust. In our current crisis it was a housing boom and bust that in turn led to financial turmoil in the United States and other countries. How did everything deteriorate so suddenly and dramatically? In Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, Hoover fellow and Stanford economist John B. Taylor offers empirical research to explain what caused the current financial crisis, what prolonged it, and what worsened it dramatically more than a year after it began.

Peter Robinson - Forbes.com

Cogent, thorough and compelling... Taylor sums up his argument in his subtitle: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis. Take a moment to absorb that. Although we're told every day that the crisis arose from failures in the free markets--that it represents a crisis of capitalism itself--an eminent economist has now stepped forward to say, in effect, "Nonsense." The markets didn't fail, Taylor argues, the government did.

What People Are Saying

James Poterba
"This short volume does a masterful job of tracking the stunning financial market and macroeconomic events of 2007 and 2008, and it provides an organizing framework that will enable the specialist and novice alike to examine these events in a coherent setting."--(James Poterba, Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT and President and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research)

George Shultz
"Big problems confront us, and responses of immense size are on the table. We desperately need a solid and fact-based analysis so that we get the prescription right. John Taylor provides just that. A must-read for everyone involved."--(George Shultz, former secretary of Treasury, State, and Labor and Budget Director)

Anna Schwartz
(If Milton Friedman and I had written as persuasive an analysis as this, one year-rather than 30 years-after the Great Depression began, the United States might have had a typical recession rather than the greatest downturn in history."--(Anna Schwartz, author, with Milton Friedman, of The Great Contraction, 1929-1933)

"John Taylor is one of the very few who points out the errors that the Federal Reserve made during this difficult period and also shows how they could avoid them. Members of Congress should read this book instead of looking for scapegoats in the wrong places."--(Allan Meltzer, author of The History of the Federal Reserve)

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents