Greg Mankiw Ponders Greenspan’s Paper the Crisis and Considers 100% Reserves

We are grateful to Robert Arbon for pointing out this article on Greg Mankiw’s Blog:

I just returned from the spring meeting of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, where I was a discussant for Alan Greenspan’s new paper on “The Crisis,” which has gotten a bit of media attention. I thought blog readers might enjoy reading my comments on the paper. Here they are:

This is a great paper. It presents one of the best comprehensive narratives about what went wrong over the past several years that I have read. If you want to assign your students only one paper to read about the recent financial crisis, this would be a good choice.

There are, however, particular pieces of the analysis about which I am skeptical. But before I get to that, let me begin by emphasizing several important points of agreement.

To begin with, Alan refers to recent events in the housing market as a “classic euphoric bubble.” He is certainly right that asset markets can depart from apparent fundamentals in ways that are often hard to understand. This has happened before, and it will happen again. When the bubble bursts, the aftershocks are never pleasant.

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