Guest post by George A. Akerlof
University of California, Berkeley
Senior Resident Scholar at the IMF, and co-host of the Conference on Rethinking Macro Policy II: First Steps and Early Lessons
(Versions in عربي, 中文, Français, 日本語, and Русский)
I learned a lot from the conference , and I’m very thankful to all the speakers. Do I have an image of the whole thing? I don’t know whether my image is going to help anybody at all, but my view is that it’s as if a cat has climbed a huge tree. It’s up there, and oh my God, we have this cat up there. The cat, of course, is this huge crisis.
And everybody at the conference has been commenting about what we should do about this stupid cat and how do we get it down and what do we do. What I find so wonderful about this conference is all the speakers have their own respective image of the cat, and nobody has the same opinion. But then, occasionally, those opinions mesh. That’s my image of what we have been accomplishing.
Filed under: Advanced Economies, Economic Crisis, Economic research, Employment, Finance, Financial Crisis, G-20, IMF, International Monetary Fund, recession | Tagged: credit, credit default swaps, economic crisis, Economics, fiscal policy, GDP, George Akerlof, IMF, iMFdirect, International Monetary Fund, mortgages | 4 Comments »
