Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles and Financial Crises, 1870-2008

40 Pages Posted: 11 Jan 2010

See all articles by Moritz Schularick

Moritz Schularick

University of Bonn - Department of Economics; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Alan M. Taylor

Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Date Written: November 2009

Abstract

The crisis of 2008-09 has focused attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. In this paper we study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the long run based on a newly constructed historical dataset for 12 developed countries over the years 1870-2008, utilizing the data to study rare events associated with financial crisis episodes. We present new evidence that leverage in the financial sector has increased strongly in the second half of the twentieth century as shown by a decoupling of money and credit aggregates, and we also find a decline in safe assets on banks' balance sheets. We also show for the first time how monetary policy responses to financial crises have been more aggressive post-1945, but how despite these policies the output costs of crises have remained large. Importantly, we can also show that credit growth is a powerful predictor of financial crises, suggesting that such crises are

Keywords: banking, central banking, financial stability, liquidity, monetary policy

JEL Classification: E44, E51, E58, G01, G20, N10, N20

Suggested Citation

Schularick, Moritz and Taylor, Alan M., Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles and Financial Crises, 1870-2008 (November 2009). CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP7570, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1533175

Moritz Schularick (Contact Author)

University of Bonn - Department of Economics ( email )

Bonn
Germany

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

Alan M. Taylor

Columbia University ( email )

3022 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

HOME PAGE: http://nber.org

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

HOME PAGE: http://cepr.org

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