Financial Crisis : The United States in the Early Twenty-First Century

This book offers a critical look at prominent theories of financial crisis to try to understand how prepared the profession is for identifying the next financial crisis. An analysis of the first financial crisis of the twenty-first century serves as a starting point for rethinking the efficacy of existing economic models and theories.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis caught many by surprise. When the dust began to settle, people began looking around and asking how this could have happened and why we did not see it coming. Criticism fell heavily on the economics profession because there was a feeling that the models and theories of economics had failed to properly warn and prepare us for a significant crisis. This book carefully analyses existing theories of financial crisis to determine if they are still appropriate for understanding modern financial crises. This is an important endeavour because financial crisis theory has largely been ignored for many years. Indeed, it has been almost twenty years since economists have seriously reconsidered financial crisis theory. This book fills that gap and offers insight into the current debate regarding the efficacy of economic models and theories relevant to understanding financial distress.