He writes,

Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and the Shocks; and my friend, patron, teacher, and (until the last reshuffle) office neighbor Barry Eichengreen ‘s Hall of Mirrors. Read and grasp the messages of both of these, and you are in the top 0.001% of the world in terms of understanding what has happened to us–and what the likely scenarios are for what comes next.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

These are ultra-Keynesian treatments of the financial crisis and its aftermath. The all-purpose causal variable is a glut of savings and a dearth of government spending.

I cannot prove that this view is wrong. However, I am more convinced by Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus, Engineering the Financial Crisis. The easiest way to summarize the book is that (with a nod to a different Kraus) risk-based capital regulations were the disease that they purported to cure.

The Friedman-Kraus story is one in which regulators suffer from the socialist calculation problem. With risk-based capital regulations, regulators determined the relative prices of various investments for banks. The prices that regulators set for risk told banks to behave as if senior tranches from mortgage-backed securities were much safer than ordinary loans, including low-risk mortgage loans held by the bank. The banks in turn used these regulated prices to guide their decisions.

In 2001, the regulators outsourced the specific risk calculations to three rating agencies–Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch. This set off a wave of securitized mortgage finance based on calculations that proved to be wrong.

Friedman and Kraus challenge the basic mindset not only of DeLong but of 99 percent of all economists. That mindset is that the socialist calculation problem, if it matters at all, only matters for full-on socialists, not for regulators in an otherwise capitalist system. In the conventional view, regulators can fail for ideological reasons, or because they are manipulated by special interests. But Friedman and Kraus offer a different thesis. When information discovery is vital, regulators, like socialist planners, are doomed to fail because they are unable to mimic the market’s groping, evolutionary approach to learning.

In Friedrich von Hayek’s Nobel Lecture, The Pretence of Knowledge, he concludes,

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society–a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

What Friedman and Kraus claim is that well-intended but now well-informed bank regulations were the destroyer, not of an entire civilization, but of a financial system. Like Hayek, they offer a profound critique of mainstream thinking. Like Hayek, they are sadly likely to be ignored.