La crisi americana: appunti di viaggio

Massimo Florio

Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract: This paper comments an invited opinion on the American crisis in the New York Times by Professor Casey Mulligan, University of Chicago. Accord-ing to Mulligan, the crisis is no more than a financial fluctuation, banks should not be bailed out, other financial actors can finance business in-vestments, the delay of investment and consumption is non a big problem, public intervention is unhelpful. This paper argues instead that the current crisis is not mainly of a financial nature, but it originates form a sustained shock that affected income distribution. The share of labour declined, while the share of capital increased. To sustain the returns to capital it was neces-sary to force lending to consumers. In the short term both monetary and fis-cal policy are needed, but in the mid-to-long run it is necessary to go back to a more balanced income distribution.

Keywords: Financial and economic crisis; Banks bail-out; Income distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E25 E62 E65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-03-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2009-10

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