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发帖数: 3620 | 1 http://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-not-wall-street-caused-1021
Thought the global financial crisis in 2008 was caused by subprime bonds,
collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other Wall Street engineering?
Think again.
According to a new study, China, not Wall Street bankers, was responsible
for the global crisis and the ensuing recession.
The study from the Erasmus Research Institute of Management says the saving
frenzy of the Chinese created the cheap money, which fueled the U.S. housing
bubble and its collapse.
Heleen Mees, writer of the study and assistant economics professor at
Tilburg University in the Netherlands, says that exotic mortgage products
could hardly have been the cause of the U.S. housing market bubble and the
its ultimate collapse.
According to the study, mortgages with those special features -- like
mortgage-backed securities and CDOs -- accounted for less than five percent
of the total number of new mortgages from 2000 to 2006.
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Mees, author of three books and contributor for Foreign Policy magazine,
says it was the "loose" monetary policy of the Federal Reserve at the
beginning of the decade which sparked a refinancing boom in the U.S. in 2003
and 2004 and a growth in personal spending. This U.S. spending binge fueled
economic growth in China and in turn boosted total savings in that country.
The study, which compared financial market responses to U.S., Chinese and
German quarterly GDP from 2006 through 2009, shows that the Chinese have
been saving more than half of their GDP during that time. Those savings were
heavily skewed towards fixed income assets like government bonds and
depressed interest rates worldwide from 2004 on.
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This allowed for interest rates around the world to fall, and sparked a boom
in the U.S. housing market due to the availability of cheap money.
The study also argues that Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal
Reserve, set the world up for the Great Recession by providing the "
intellectual backing for the aggressive rate cuts in the early 2000s."
With so many books out on the financial crisis, Mees recommends people read
Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor by Arthur Lewis and
she says people should avoid one of the blockbusters on the crisis, The Big
Short by Michael Lewis. |
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