July 27, 2010
The Washington Post had an article discussing the debate over how central banks can prevent future economic collapses like the current one. As is its practice, the Post relied exclusively on economists who were not able to see the crisis coming. As a result, it fundamentally misrepresents the crisis as being primarily financial in nature.
In fact, the main problem was that the housing bubble was driving the economy, generating $1.2 trillion in annual demand through construction and housing equity driven consumption. There is no easy mechanism through the economy can replace this much lost demand. That would be the case whether or not the collapse of the bubble was associated with a financial crisis.
The article also fails to list one of the most simple and obvious ways that central banks can combat a bubble: talk. During the run-up of the housing bubble, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan repeatedly said that everything was fine in the housing market, as did Ben Bernanke, who was a governor at the Fed for most of the period. This helped undermine the case of those who were warning of the bubble.
By contrast, if Greenspan had explicitly warned of the bubble and documented its existance and potential dangers with extensive research from the Fed staff, it may have been effective in containing its growth. The financial industry cannot simply ignore research from the Fed and there was no serious response to the evidence that the Fed could have presented.
There is no reason the Fed and other central banks cannot use the full capabilities of their research staff to attempt to counter dangerous financial bubbles. There is a virtually costless strategy with enormous potential payoffs.
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