Summers y la Agenda Económica

Larry Summers, ex-Secretario del Tesoro de Estados Unidos y ex-Presidente de Harvard, ha escrito un excelente artículo sobre los temas más importantes de la agenda económica a los que se enfrentará quien quiera que sea el nuevo Presidente de los Estados Unidos.

De entrada, Summers explica con una gran claridad porque la recesión actual de la economía norteamericana es diferente a otras:

Economic history suggests that there are two primary kinds of recessions. The recessions that were standard in the United States for most of the post-World War II period might be called Federal Reserve inflation control: inflation got out of control, the Fed hit the brakes, the economy skidded, the Fed took its foot off the brakes, the economy recovered. In many ways, the more serious and profound source of economic instability is asset-price collapse: credit-crunch recessions of the kind we are experiencing now. This is the kind we experienced after 2001, the Japanese experienced in the 1990s, and we in the United States experienced during the 1930s. Because of the strains they place on the financial system—which at the same time loses capital and loses the ability to lever the capital that it does have—such price-collapse recessions typically tend to involve protracted, painful recoveries.