Financial Assets, Debt and Liquidity Crises

This book shows how the Keynesian approach to business cycles can be used to explain and understand the current financial crisis.

The current financial crisis has led to a renewed interest in Keynesian economic models because they allow for a stronger relationship between the financial sector and the 'real' economy. This book shows how we can extend the Keynesian approach to explain a variety of phenomena related to the current crisis.The macroeconomic development of most major industrial economies is characterised by boom-bust cycles. Normally such boom-bust cycles are driven by specific sectors of the economy. In the financial meltdown of the years 2007–9 it was the credit sector and the real-estate sector that were the main driving forces. This book takes on the challenge of interpreting and modelling this meltdown. In doing so it revives the traditional Keynesian approach to the financial-real economy interaction and the business cycle, extending it in several important ways. In particular, it adopts the Keynesian view of a hierarchy of markets and introduces a detailed financial sector into the traditional Keynesian framework. The approach of the book goes beyond the currently dominant paradigm based on the representative agent, market clearing and rational economic agents. Instead it proposes an economy populated with heterogeneous, rationally bounded agents attempting to cope with disequilibria in various markets.