Great Depression strikes back

Is still hotly disputed. What has the devastating crisis? The blind faith in the financial markets? Fault policy? Too much cheap money by the banks? It is not yet clear how this debate out. But among the great economic thinkers in America interrupts a train Interpretation: It is a serious turning point. A historic shift in economic thinking.

“We are witnessing the failure of market fundamentalism,” says Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Others talk of the end of previous paradigms. And even Kapitalismusverfechter designated as Edmund Phelps, Nobel laureate also, diagnosed: “The crisis has destroyed the idea that the market failures on his own somewhat lenient nature corrects itself.”

The financial crisis has reached such vast dimensions that much for a new era in the economics speaks, that the pendulum back again – away from total belief in the market, to the state and the new regulations. Just as after the Great Depression of the 30s years of the 20th Century was the case when the crash from a new generation of economists showed: of thinkers, from the terrible crisis, and therefore tried to learn from naive faith in the market to draw.

“It is not enough, the conventional economic theory here and there to cement,” write Nobel Laureate George Akerlof and financial expert Robert Shiller bubble in her just published book in English about the “Animal Spirits”. “We need an entirely new theory.” After her diagnosis can be done with the usual notions of rational market behavior does not explain how the crisis came. Rather, with the fever of speculation, “with the herd instinct, and always resulting surplus of trust or skepticism. Just to the healing power of the market to believe that too little.