The Financial Crisis Reconsidered: The Mercantilist Origin of Secular Stagnation and Boom-Bust Cycles

In The Financial Crisis Reconsidered, Aronoff challenges the conventional view that reckless credit produced the US housing boom and the financial crisis, explaining how the large current account deficit, and its mercantilist origin, was a more fundamental cause. He also demonstrates that the decision to provide relief for bank creditors rather than underwater homeowners was responsible for the prolonged recession that followed the crisis.

Aronoff proposes a novel theory to account for the u...