A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression [Hardcover]

The Honorable Richard A. Posner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674035143 | ISBN-13: 978-0674035140 | Publication Date: May 1, 2009 | Edition: 1

The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 is the most alarming of our lifetime because of the warp-speed at which it is occurring. How could it have happened, especially after all that we’ve learned from the Great Depression? Why wasn’t it anticipated so that remedial steps could be taken to avoid or mitigate it? What can be done to reverse a slide into a full-blown depression? Why have the responses to date of the government and the economics profession been so lackluster? Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it. No previous acquaintance on the part of the reader with macroeconomics or the theory of finance is presupposed. This is a book for intelligent generalists that will interest specialists as well.

Among the facts and causes Posner identifies are: excess savings flowing in from Asia and the reckless lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board; the relation between executive compensation, short-term profit goals, and risky lending; the housing bubble fuelled by low interest rates, aggressive mortgage marketing, and loose regulations; the low savings rate of American people; and the highly leveraged balance sheets of large financial institutions.

Posner analyzes the two basic remedial approaches to the crisis, which correspond to the two theories of the cause of the Great Depression: the monetarist—that the Federal Reserve Board allowed the money supply to shrink, thus failing to prevent a disastrous deflation—and the Keynesian—that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920’s, a stock-market crash, and the ensuing downward spiral in economic activity. Posner concludes that the pendulum swung too far and that our financial markets need to be more heavily regulated.

Read Richard Posner's blog, and his latest article in The Atlantic. (20090501)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Posner (How Judges Think) is uncharacteristically dry in this dense book that states flatly that we are in a recession only because we are too frightened to call it a depression. He makes a near-heroic attempt to delve into the roots of the current crisis, citing some of the harder questions: how did it happen? why was it not anticipated? how is the government responding? A great deal of ground is covered, and the book takes the form of a high-altitude survey, assessing all the major points without getting bogged down in detail. Quickie explanations of subprime mortgages and the credit crunch orient the reader, and Posner addresses the takeaway lessons about capitalism and government, the puzzling lack of foresight from the economist community, the apportioning of blame and the resulting future of conservatism. All good topics, thoroughly and thoughtfully presented, but much of Posner's material is already woefully out of date. This book will make a serviceable study of the current crisis, but it does not serve its intended audience well in the meantime. (May)
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Review

Lively, readable, and plainspoken...Posner has an extraordinarily sharp mind.
--Robert M. Solow (New York Review of Books 20090503)

Posner has managed to write a compelling book on the crash...The book has numerous worthwhile insights, including a surprisingly Keynesian analysis of the dynamics of depressions.
--Robert Kuttner (American Prospect 20090505)

A surprising volume that explains what happened to the banking system and economy in terms the lay reader can easily understand...[Posner's] critique is bracing, all the more so because it comes from a right-leaning thinker normally hostile to the ministrations of government bureaucrats.
--Paul M. Barrett (Washington Post Book World 20090517)

Before seeking political asylum in free-market Hong Kong, consider reading a new book that critiques what went wrong with capitalism, written in order to save it. Judge Richard Posner's A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression is noteworthy. As a longtime University of Chicago professor and father of the free-market-based law-and-economics movement, Judge Posner makes an unlikely critic of capitalism. But as author of some 40 books and as the most frequently cited federal appeals court jurist, he is also one of our most original and clearheaded thinkers.
--L. Gordon Crovitz (Wall Street Journal 20090601)

It comes as something of a surprise that Posner, a doyen of the market-oriented law-and-economics movement, should deliver a roundhouse punch to the proposition that markets are self-correcting. It might also seem odd that a federal appellate judge (and University of Chicago law lecturer) would be among the first out of the gate with a comprehensive book on the financial crisis--if, that is, the judge were any other judge. But Posner is the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's successor as the country's most omnivorous and independent-minded public intellectual. By now, his dozens of books just about fill their own wing in the Library of Congress...Compact and bracingly lucid...By the last page, not a single lazy generalization has survived Posner's merciless scrutiny, not one populist cliché remains standing. A Failure of Capitalism clears away whole forests of cant but leaves readers at a loss as to where to go from here. In other words, it is only a starting point--but an indispensable one.
--Jonathan Rauch (New York Times Book Review 20090619)

[Posner] has the rare kind of mind that is a pure pleasure to watch in action, regardless of the subject and the argument being made.
--John Lanchester (New Yorker 20090731)

Richard Posner is one of America's most prominent and prolific public intellectuals...With his concise, jargon-free analysis of the current economic crisis, Posner has cast his lot with those who believe that the "depression" (given the steep reduction in consumption, credit and production, the term, he insists, is appropriate) was the result "not of intrusive, heavy-handed regulation of housing and finance, but of deregulation, hostility to taxation and to government in general."
--Glenn C. Altschuler (Jerusalem Post 20090701)

Richard Posner is a phenomenon...He provides a very competent account of the events which led to the current crisis, with an emphasis on the political and ideological context.
--John Kay (Financial Times 20091205)

[Posner] is the quintessential U.S. economic-conservative intellectual...So an excoriating attack by Posner on modern financial market practices is news. A Failure of Capitalism is precisely that. There are still U.S. conservatives who think the crisis was overdone, that the policy response has been too great, that this was merely a crisis of confidence and liquidity, and that the banking system was not insolvent, merely illiquid. That is not Posner's view. His judgment is that the banking system is insolvent and the crisis that took place in 2008 transformed a recession in the US into a depression...In his preface, Posner emphasizes that he has written the book in medias res, a lawyer's way of saying "in the thick of it," with the implication that he has yet fully to make up his mind. He has, however, offered a thought-provoking interim analysis of what went wrong.
--Warwick Lightfoot (Financial World 20101223)

The best book describing this malaise is Richard Posner's A Failure of Capitalism. The distinctiveness of his case is that he is a prominent conservative thinker with the intellectual acuity to argue that the crisis is not to do with the traditional enemy of conservatism, big government, but is a consequence of decisions taken by private firms. The ill-effects of those decisions were worsened by deregulation of banking.
--Oliver Kamm (The Times 20110101)

[A] compelling read...Notable for [its] high seriousness and sophistication.
--Robert Teitelman (Huffington Post )

[Posner's] bracing and intellectually admirable A Failure of Capitalism demands attention.
--Jonathan Kirshner (Boston Review )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (May 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674035143
• ISBN-13: 978-0674035140
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #240,481 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard A. Posner is a judge of the U.S. Court Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the author of numerous books, including Overcoming Law, a New York Times Book Review editors' choices for best book of 1995 and An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton, one of Times' choices for Best Book of the Year in 1999 and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, 2000.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

128 of 134 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Judge Posner takes on the "Depression", April 26, 2009

By 

John P. (Kennett Square, PA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (Hardcover)

This is the fifth book by Richard Posner (law professor at the University of Chicago and a long-time judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals) that I've read, in addition to many legal opinions. There is no question that he's brilliant and an excellent, clear, and precise writer. There is also no question about his credentials as a libertarian-leaning conservative.

Until now, that is. "A Failure of Capitalism" departs consciously from the prevailing libertarian take on the current recession (or, as Judge Posner argues it should be called, "depression"). In short, he believes that the depression was not mainly caused by government meddling. Rather, it is a "market failure" -- i.e., a crisis that market forces alone could not have prevented. And, given the size of this market failure, government should instead have used regulations to prevent it.

Before I got the book, I had read some indications that Judge Posner was taking this line. But in the book itself, he is crystal clear about his view that deregulation in the financial industry was a major culprit, and his recognition that he is going against the conventional wisdom of both libertarians and conservatives.

The book is well argued and much more thorough than I can convey here. One of the great things about Judge Posner's style is that he anticipates all of the reader's objections and tries to address them in good faith. Whether you agree or disagree, he is always worth reading.

The book also includes a narrative of how the depression developed, descriptions of the systemic problems in the financial industry that made the depression possible, and recommendations for government action.

Although the material may be a little difficult for those with no knowledge of finance, it has been intentionally written with non-specialists in mind. As always, Judge Posner repays the attentive reader.

58 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We're All Guilty, Some Much More Than Others!, May 3, 2009

By 

Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (Hardcover)

Judge Posner was appointed to a Federal Appeals Court position by President Reagan, and has sometimes also been mentioned as a Supreme Court candidate. During his legal career he has pioneered the inclusion of economic perspectives in interpreting law and now regularly writes a blog on economics. In "A Failure of Capitalism" he focuses his combined talents on our current economic downturn, and reaches a surprising (for a conservative, "Chicago-school" proponent) verdict. Those most guilty of contributing to the downturn are Alan Greenspan and George W. Bush - Greenspan for keeping interest rates low, fueling the surge in home prices, and Bush for accelerating deregulation of financial markets and then doing little while the economy began crumbling. (Posner also includes the monies China invested in T-bills as a factor holding American interest rates low.)

At the same time, home buyers and their willing enabler mortgage brokers knew they were getting in over their heads. Wall Street, seeing a great opportunity, then leveraged these new mortgages to extreme levels. Thus, both mortgage-takers and Wall Street were in over their heads. (Posner believes home-buyers' failure to save was part of the problem - reality, however, is that they thought they were saving big time through home appreciation.)

Posner's Prescription: More EFFECTIVE government regulation, not just expanding the hodge-podge of overlapping partial management spread over myriad state and federal agencies. This should include limits on leverage, changing how credit-rating agencies operate and are compensated, requiring CDS be fully collateralized, limiting payday loans, etc. Posner also worries about the impact of enormous bailout monies on the value of our currency.

Why the title "A Failure of Capitalism?" Posner recognizes that competition carries the seeds of capitalism's destruction - bankers, etc. realize that if they don't participate in whatever current fad is popular, they risk becoming unemployed and their firm bought out by others who ride the fad to higher P/E multiples. That's why government regulation is essential.

Posner also believes that the free market is incapable of appropriately setting executive salaries and mutual (and hedge) fund fees due to the inherent biases and conflicts of interest involved. Finally, Posner also points out that current conservative thinking on this subject is vacuous.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Analysis, Despite the Dumb Title, May 29, 2009

By 

Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (Hardcover)

Richard Posner comes as close to a true American Intellectual, of the old Walter Lippmann type, as anyone alive. His fame and popularity are deserved, and this hard-hitting yet extremely accessible book is probably his most important contribution to American political debate. Financial economics is not all that difficult, there aren't widely divergent schools of thought on the subject, and it is pretty easy to explain, as long as international trade, balance of payments, and exchange rate factors are not at issue. Posner could not be more lucid, and I could discern no mistakes or biases. The title of the book is pretty wrong-headed, though: Posner shows that the failure is one of proper regulation of financial institutions, not of "capitalism," and I very much doubt that we are descending "into depression," as Posner and many other scare-mongers suggest (take a tip from me, dear reader: take any spare money you have and put it into the market, right now; you'll thank me later).

Says Posner at the outset: "Some conservatives believe that the depression is the result of unwise government policies. I believe it is a market failure...The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience---the self-healing powers---of laissez-faire capitalism. "(p. xii) The conservative argument, which Posner does not even consider worth addressing in more than a passing manner, is that liberal politicians pushed the banking industry into taking on unwanted risk, using the bullying legislative power of Congress and the irresponsible semi-public mortgage institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Posner gives short schrift to the equally dumb liberal argument that the financial crisis was caused by "corporate greed."

Probably the most popular argument for the financial crisis is that put forth by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, in their book Animal Spirits. This book is quite worth reading, but their argument that it is the "irrationality" of economic actors that causes such crises is probably wrong. Certainly Posner thinks so, as he directs his biggest guns toward showing that it is the normal operation of markets, populated by rational decision-makers, that leads to instability. Posner agrees with Akerlof and Shiller that downward wage rigidity is a precondition for the sort of Keynesian economies we are used to seeing, and that this phenomenon is linked to the softer "social relations" side of the workplace that is usually left out of the economics textbooks. But, beyond this, he asserts, the standard rational calculations of economic actors can account for the housing and credit bubbles we have witnessed.

The first target of Posner's attack is the assertion, often suggested by professional economists and financial analysis, that extensive financial innovation in mortgage packaging (credit-debt swaps and the like) fooled bankers into thinking they had safe assess when in fact they did not. This situation may have held during the early years of the housing build-up, but as early as September 2002, The Economist, widely read by the economically literate, spotted the housing bubble, and the Financial Times followed suit by 2004. The fact that credit rating agencies rated these new instruments as AAA could not fool the bankers, who knew that the credit-rating agencies were chosen by and paid by the firms that they advised, and generally told them what they wanted to hear; what they wanted to hear was that the new mortgage instruments were sound. Of course, if housing prices were to fall precipitously, bank defaults would be inevitable. But the authorities in Washington, including the Chairman of the Fed, were saying that housing prices were bound to level off, but that "new fundamentals" would be established at much higher price levels than in the past. By 2006, houses were seriously overvalued in hindsight, as witnessed by the fact that speculation in houses by the well-to-do accounted for a majority of home purchases even at the height of the bubble.

Posner rightly tresses that in business, investment behavior and general business practice develop by individuals imitating the successful behavior of others, and by assuming that the future will be more or less like the past, unless events indicate otherwise. Thus, asset bubbles sound irrational, but when rational agents are in the middle of one, they do not simply get off the gravy train because of a curious asymmetry of competition. If a large bank said in 2004 that it would no longer participate in the mortgage market, its shareholders would hold it accountable for the foregone profits in case housing prices continued to rise and stabilized at a high level, and would probably force a change in leadership over the course of a year or less. By contrast, if the bank went along with the general state of opinion, even in the case of collapse, they would be unlikely to be blamed because they merely followed the received wisdom of the marketplace. Posner here quotes Keynes approvingly: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

Moreover, Posner notes that the structure of executive compensation encouraged excessive risk-taking. "The tendency of corporate management to cling to a bubble and hope for the best...is strengthened if...executive compensation is both very generous and truncated on the downside. For then every day that you stay in you make a lot of money, and you know that when the bubble bursts you'll be okay because you have negotiated a generous severance package with your board of directors." (p. 93) Posner is both accurate and eloquent in analyzing how virtually all participants, politicians, lawyers, accounting firms, boards of directors, find it in their interest to prolong the roller coaster ride as long as possible. The result is a disaster for the economy as a whole, and for the many lower-level workers and pensioners who are devastated by the resulting meltdown, but there is nothing irrational in the behavior of the major participants.

It is precisely for this reason that Posner calls the crisis a "failure of capitalism." According to his logic, there will always be expansionary periods that get out of hand, in which the prudent are cast aside in favor of the risk-tolerant, and a tide of justifiable optimistic expectations ensues, even though in hindsight a coordinated retreat could have left all parties better off.

My own agent-based model of large-scale multi-market economies ("The Dynamics of General Equilibrium," The Economic Journal 117 October 2007) quite supports Posner's analysis. The same high level of incomplete information that renders market economies so potent a force in aggregating the plans of millions of consumers, workers, and employers bears as a byproduct the tendency to tolerate and even promote large excursions of prices and quantities away from their equilibrium levels. No doubt there will be new sets of regulations preventing the recurrence of the conditions that led to the current crisis, but new conditions will lead to new bubbles. I'm not sure if this is a failure of capitalism, but it is a stable characteristic of capitalism that cannot be legislated out of existence, save at the cost of severely crimping innovation and growth