Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles and Financial Crises, 1870-2008

The crisis of the advanced economies in 2008-09 has focused new attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. We study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the long run based on a new historical dataset for 14 countries over the years 1870-2008, using the data to study rare events associated with financial crisis episodes. We present new evidence that leverage in the financial sector has increased strongly in the second half of the twentieth century as shown by a decoupling of money and credit aggregates. We show for the first time how monetary policy responses to financial crises have been more aggressive post-1945, but how despite these…

• LS
  London School of Economics and Political Science