Interview with Gary Gorton

Here’s a recent interview with Gary Gorton on financial crises.

From the introduction:

Read enough books and economics papers about the recent US financial crisis, and at some point you might notice something odd.

 

Most of them are about the factors that made the crisis and subsequent recession so profound and enduring — excess leverage, deregulation, lax lending standards, the rise of securitisation, blindness of the rating agencies, fraudulent bankers — but very few of them are about what actually started the crisis.

 

Gary Gorton’s work is different. His 2009 book, “Slapped by the Invisible Hand”, argued that although these factors were all present, they were also somewhat beside the point. The financial crisis started the way all systemic financial crises start: as a bank run. The only difference was that this bank run took place in the shadow banking system, and the creditors who started the run weren’t depositors of retail banks, but the counterparties of investment banks in repo and commercial paper markets.

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