Were chief executives at financial firms caught in "a financial tsunami" beyond their control, or are they partly responsible for what happened?: A Tsunami of Excuses, by William Cohan, Commentary, NY Times: It's been a year since Bear Stearns collapsed, kicking off Wall Street’s mel...

James Surowiecki takes on John Taylor: Did Lehman Brothers’s Failure Matter?, The Financial Page: By this point, it’s become conventional wisdom that the failure of Lehman Brothers last September was the catalyst for a massive selloff in the credit and stock markets and a general flight to safet...

Robert Shiller: A failure to control the animal spirits, by Robert Shiller, Commentary, FT: ...We are seeing, in this financial crisis, a rebirth of Keynesian economics. We are talking again of ... the Great Depression. This era, like the present, saw many calls to end capitalism as we know it. The ...

Alan Blinder is not a fan of nationalization: Nationalize? Hey, Not So Fast, by Alan S. Blinder, Commentary, NY Times: ...When philosophical conservatives like Alan Greenspan start talking about nationalizing banks, you know you’ve passed into some kind of parallel universe. ... Like Ben Bernanke ...

This outlines the different sources of credit for small banks and their customers, and which of those sources are likely to dry up in a credit crunch: How Will a Credit Crunch Affect Small Business Finance?, by Gregory F. Udell, FRBSF Economic Letter: There is considerable concern about the duration...

If you try to bring dead assets back to life, you may end up creating zombie banks: The Big Dither, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Last month ... President Obama argued for bold steps to fix America’s dysfunctional banks. “While the cost of action will be great,� he declared, “I can ...

Arin Dube explains three options for getting rid of zombie banks: The Political-Economy of Financial Adjustment – or Ridding Ourselves of the Zombies, by Arindrajit Dube: When it comes to the recovery of the financial sector, I think it is helpful to distinguish three types of adjustment processes...

Tyler Cowen is pessimistic about about the near term future of the banking industry: Message to Regulators: Bank Fix Needed Quickly, by Tyler Cowen, Economic View, NY Times: A new bank rescue plan may be more crucial right now than the fiscal stimulus package enacted last month. Yet we don’t seem ...

This voxeu.org column argues that bank nationalisation is the best hope we have for avoiding a “lost decade like Japan": The case for and against bank nationalisation, by Matthew Richardson, Vox EU: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s financial plan calls for stress tests at the large com...

Was bad advice to developing countries partly responsible for the financial crisis? According to this, the answer is yes: How China helped create the macroeconomic backdrop for financial crisis, by Moritz Schularick, Economist's Forum: Over the past decade, China and other emerging markets accum...