If you want to read a very short book on how we got into the financial crisis, I don't think you could do better than John B. Taylor s Getting Off Track. --Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report

A sobering book by a Stanford University economist demonstrates not only how the feds caused, misdiagnosed and mishandled the financial crisis, but also how their responses continue to make matters worse. --Robin Goldwyn Blumenthal, Barron's Magazine

AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF WHAT WENT WRONG

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 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.

Visit Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis Download Page

You can download Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis in PDF format.

Hardcover: 92 pages
Author: John B. Taylor
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press; 1 New edition (February 25, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0817949712
ISBN-13: 978-0817949716

PREFACE
WHAT CAUSED THE FINANCIAL CRISIS? What prolonged it? What worsened it dramatically more than a year after it began? Rarely in economics is there a single answer to such questions, but the empirical research I present in this book strongly suggests that specific government actions and interventions should be first on the list of answers to all three. I focus on the period from the start of the crisis through the fall of 2008, when market conditions deteriorated precipitously and rapidly.

Simply put, when policy started getting off track—especially when compared with the period of good performance during the previous two decades—financial and economic conditions turned sour.

This book integrates a series of research papers, speeches at central banks, and congressional testimony I have written on the financial crisis during the past two years. That work is detailed in the reference section at the end of the book; bracketed numbers in the text refer to the specific works. ...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John B. Taylor is the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He has served as the director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and was founding director of Stanford's Introductory Economics Center.

Taylor's fields of expertise are monetary policy, fiscal policy, and international economics. He has an active interest in public policy. Taylor is currently a member of the California Governor's Council of Economic Advisors, where he also previously served from 1996 to 1998. In the past, he served as senior economist on President Ford's Council of Economic Advisers in 1976, as a member of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 through 1991, as economic adviser to the Bob Dole presidential campaign in 1996, and as economic adviser to the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 2000. He was also a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 2001.

For four years from 2001 to 2005, Taylor served as Undersecretary of Treasury for International Affairs where he was responsible for U.S. policies in international finance, which includes currency markets, trade in financial services, foreign investment, international debt and development, and oversight of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He was also responsible for coordinating financial policy with the G-7 countries, was chair of the working party on international macroeconomics at the OECD, and was a member of the Board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

In 2007, Taylor was awarded the Adam Smith Award from the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) for his work as a groundbreaking researcher, public servant, and teacher during a career of more than 30 years and his outstanding leadership in the field of economics. Taylor was also awarded the Alexander Hamilton Award for his overall leadership in international finance at the U.S. Treasury and the Treasury Distinguished Service Award for designing and implementing the currency reforms in Iraq, and the Medal of the Republic of Uruguay for his work in resolving the 2002 financial crisis.

In 2005, The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research awarded Taylor with the George P. Shultz Distinguished Public Service Award. Taylor has also won many teaching awards; he was awarded the Hoagland Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching and the Rhodes Prize for his high teaching ratings in Stanford's introductory economics course. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society; he formerly served as vice president of the American Economic Association.

Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1984, Taylor held positions as professor of economics at Princeton University and Columbia University. Taylor received a B.A. in economics summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1973.

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