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32 posts on "Economic History"
July 15, 2015

A Discussion of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty‑First Century: Does More Capital Increase Inequality?

My aim in the second post of this series on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is to talk about the economist’s research accomplishment in reconstructing capital-output ratios for developed countries from the Industrial Revolution to the present and using them to explain why wealth inequality will rise in developed countries.

July 13, 2015

A Discussion of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty‑First Century: By How Much Is r Greater than g?

Maxim Pinkovskiy describes the arguments that Thomas Piketty makes to conclude that wealth inequality will rise and that global capital taxation is needed to stop it, and offers a critical discussion of the arguments.

May 8, 2015

Crisis Chronicles: The Man on the Twenty‑Dollar Bill and the Panic of 1837

Thomas Klitgaard and James Narron Correction: This post was updated on May 8 to correct the book title and spelling of the author’s name in the fifth paragraph. We regret the error. President Andrew Jackson was a “hard money” man. He saw specie—that is, gold and silver—as real money, and considered paper money a suspicious […]

Posted at 7:00 am in Crisis, Economic History, Panic | Permalink | Comments (8)
April 10, 2015

Crisis Chronicles: The Panic of 1825 and the Most Fantastic Financial Swindle of All Time

Centered in London, the banking panic of 1825 has been called the first modern financial crisis, the first Latin American crisis, and the first emerging market crisis. And while the panic displayed many of the key elements of past crises we have covered—fluctuations in money growth, an investment bubble, a stock market crash, and bank runs—this crisis had its own twists, including a Bank of England that hesitated before stepping in as lender of last resort. But it is perhaps best known for an infamous bond market swindle surrounding an entirely made-up Central American principality. In this edition of Crisis Chronicles, we explore the Panic of 1825 and visit the mythical nation of Poyais.

August 14, 2014

Just Released: Looking under the Hood of the Subprime Auto Lending Market

Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw Today, the New York Fed released the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the second quarter of 2014. Aggregate debt was relatively flat in the second quarter as housing-related debt shrank, held down by sluggish mortgage originations. But non-housing debt balances […]

May 13, 2014

Just Released: Young Student Loan Borrowers Remained on the Sidelines of the Housing Market in 2013

Last year, our blog presented results from the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) indicating that, at a time of unprecedented growth in student debt, student borrowers were collectively retreating from housing and auto markets. In this post, we compare our 2012 findings to the news for 2013.

March 27, 2014

The Growth of Murky Finance

Building upon previous posts in this series that discussed individual banks, we examine the historical growth of the entire financial sector, relative to the rest of the economy.

September 30, 2013

Crisis Chronicles: The “Not So Great” Re‑Coinage of 1696

James Narron and David Skeie In the late 1600s, England operated a bi-metallic monetary system of high-value gold coins and lower-value silver coins. In the early 1690s, however, the market price of silver began to rise at a time when the mint price of gold was higher than the market price. Thus, gold bullion was […]

September 6, 2013

Crisis Chronicles: Tulip Mania, 1633‑37

James Narron and David Skeie As Mike Dash notes in his well-researched and gripping Tulipomania, tulips are native to central Asia and arrived in the 1570s in what’s now Holland, primarily through the efforts of botanist Charles de L’Escluse, who classified and spread tulip bulbs among horticulturalists in the late 1500s and early 1600s. By […]

June 24, 2013

Crisis Chronicles: 300 Years of Financial Crises (1620–1920)

James Narron and David Skeie As momentous as financial crises have been in the past century, we sometimes forget that major financial crises have occurred for centuries—and often. This new series chronicles mostly forgotten financial crises over the 300 years—from 1620 to 1920—just prior to the Great Depression. Today, we journey back to the 1620s […]

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