Fixing Banks is Not the Answer?

Adair Turner writes about addresses the Eurozone’s economic problems:

A “credit crunch” – particularly in trade finance – was certainly a key reason why the financial crisis generated a real economy recession. Taxpayer-funded bank rescues, higher bank capital requirements, and ultra-easy monetary policy have all been vital to overcome credit supply constraints. But there is strong evidence that once the immediate crisis was over, lack of demand for credit played a far larger role than restricted supply in impeding economic growth.   Draghi’s Funding for Lending Scheme
That argument is persuasively made by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi in House of Debt, an important new book that analyzes US data on a county-by-county basis. Mian and Sufi show that the recession was caused by a collapse of household consumption, and that consumption fell most in those counties where pre-crisis borrowing and post-crisis real-estate prices left households facing the largest relative losses in net wealth.

Draghi

 

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