John B. Taylor

Throughout history, financial crises have always been caused by excesses--frequently monetary excesses--which lead to a boom and an inevitable bust. In our current crisis it was a housing boom and bust that in turn led to financial turmoil in the United States and other countries. How did everything deteriorate so suddenly and dramatically? In Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, Hoover fellow and Stanford economist John B. Taylor offers empirical research to explain what caused the current financial crisis, what prolonged it, and what worsened it dramatically more than a year after it began. The author tells how unusually easy monetary policy helped set the crisis in motion, as interest rates at the Federal Reserve and several other central banks deviated from historical regularities. He explains monetary interaction with the subprime mortgage problem, showing how the use of these mortgages, especially the adjustable-rate variety, led to excessive risk taking. In the United States this was encouraged by government programs designed to promote home ownership, a worthwhile goal but overdone in retrospect. Looking ahead, the author suggests a set of principles to follow to prevent misguided actions and interventions in the future

Prólogo de Pedro Schwartz. ¿Por qué se produjo la crisis financiera? ¿Por qué se prolongó? ¿Por qué empeoró drásticamente más de un año después de haber comenzado? Estas tres preguntas encuentran respuestas claras, concisas y contundentes en Sin rumbo. En este libro, John B. Taylor creador de la conocida regla de Taylor de la Teoria Monetaria expone de forma amena y sencilla por que las actuaciones y las intervenciones publicas se han ganado en esta crisis el dudoso honor de figurar en los primeros puestos de la lista de culpables.