Menzie Chinn The Progress of the Financial Crisis in One Picture: Mortgages, Flight to Safety, Credit Lock

November 22, 2008

Menzie Chinn The Progress of the Financial Crisis in One Picture: Mortgages, Flight to Safety, Credit Lock

Econbrowser: The Progress of the Financial Crisis in One Picture: Mortgages, Flight to Safety, Credit Lock: Markus Brunnermeier provides an excellent summary graph of the financial crisis, told in "spreads".

Econbrowser: The Progress of the Financial Crisis in One Picture: Mortgages, Flight to Safety, Credit Lock

Figure 3 from Brunnermeier (2008): Interest Rate Spreads. The top panel shows the LIBOR-OIS spread (dark shaded area). The TED spread (LIBOR minus the Treasury bill rate) is given by the sum of two shaded areas. It also captures the fact that Treasury bonds are especially sought-after collateral in times of crisis. The top panel also shows the ABCP rate minus OIS spread, while the lower panel depicts the spread between mortgage backed repos and general collateral repos and the agency spread. Sources: Bloomberg, LehmanLive, and Federal Reserve Board.

From the conclusion to M.K. Brunnermeier, "Deciphering the Liquidity and Credit Crunch 2007-08," forthcoming Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2009, 23(1):

An increase in mortgage delinquencies due to a nationwide decline in housing prices was the trigger for a full-blown liquidity crisis that emerged in 2007 and might well drag on over the next years. While each crisis has its own specificities, the current one has been surprisingly close to a "classical banking crisis". What is new about this crisis is the extent of securitization, which led to an opaque web of interconnected obligations. This paper outlined several amplification mechanisms that help explain the causes of the financial turmoil. These mechanisms also form a natural point from which to start thinking about a new financial architecture. For example, fire-sale externalities and network effects suggest that financial institutions have an individual incentive to take on too much leverage, to have excessive mismatch in asset-liability maturities, and to be too 36 interconnected. Brunnermeier (2008b) discusses the possible direction of future financial regulation using measures of risk that take these domino effects into account.

(As an aside, I'll observe that in this paper, Fannie and Freddie do not make appearances as "causes" of the crisis. I wonder who has an interest in pushing the view of Fannie and Freddie as betes noire.

November 22, 2008 at 09:42 AM in Economics | Permalink

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About Brad DeLong

Leigh Speakers' Bureau
The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities still seems very strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.
J. Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, chair of its political economy major, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and was in the Clinton administration a deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His best work extends from business cycle dynamics through economic growth, behavioral finance, political economy, economic history, international finance to the history of economic thought and other topics.
Among his best works are: "Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?" "Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare," "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth," "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?" "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style," "America's Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s," "American Fiscal Policy in the Shadow of the Great Depression," "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain," "Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: Clinton Administration International Monetary and Financial Policy," "Productivity Growth in the 2000s," "Asset Returns and Economic Growth."

Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

November 22, 2008