Written by John Lounsbury
Adair Turner, Chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) was interviewed last weekend (19 March 2016) by Romesh Vaitilingam. Lord Turner is the former chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and had the dubious privilege of leading that organization through the Great Financial Crisis. He is uniquely qualified to provide insight into the problems that led to that crisis and attributes a significant part of the cause to poor practices by economists, who misled the world into fallacious thinking and the piling up of excessive private sector debt.
Here is a summary of the interview from Voxeu.org:
Prior to the Global Crisis, modern macroeconomics largely ignored the details of the financial system, and favoured mathematical precision and elegance at the expense of realism. So argues Adair Turner in this Vox Talk. He also explains the key arguments in his book, ‘Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit and Fixing Global Finance‘: that most credit is not needed for economic growth but rather drives real estate booms and busts; and that sometimes it’s better to print your way out of financial crises.
Listen to the interview:
