Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

The 2008-2009 recession : market or policy maker failure? -- Recessions: financial instability or monetary mismanagement? -- The great contraction: 1929-1933 -- Monetary policy and bank runs in the great depression -- Vigorous recovery and relapse: 1933-1939 -- Interwar international monetary experiments -- Identifying the shocks that cause recessions -- From stop-go to the great moderation -- Controlling bank risk taking: market or regulatory discipline? -- The housing crash : subsidizing housing and bank risk taking -- Bubble trouble: easy money in 2003 and 2004? -- What caused the great recession of 2008-2009? -- What caused the great leverage collapse? -- The distinctions between credit, monetary, and liquidity policy -- Fed market interventions : the experiment with credit policy -- Evaluating policy : what are the relevant counterfactuals -- The business cycle: market instability or monetary instability? -- Why is learning so hard? -- How should society regulate capitalism: rules versus discretion.

Since publication of Hetzel's The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve (Cambridge University Press, 2008), the intellectual consensus that had characterized macroeconomics has disappeared. That consensus emphasized efficient markets, rational expectations and the efficacy of the price system in assuring macroeconomic stability. The 2008-9 recession not only destroyed the professional consensus about the kinds of models required to understand cyclical fluctuations but also revived the credit-cycle or asset-bubble explanations of recession that dominated thinking in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. These 'market-disorder' views emphasize excessive risk taking in financial markets and the need for government regulation. The present book argues for the alternative 'monetary-disorder' view of recessions. A review of cyclical instability over the last two centuries places the 2008-9 recession in the monetary-disorder tradition, which focuses on the monetary instability created by central banks rather than on a boom-bust cycle in financial markets.