Robert Hetzel’s new book “The Great Recession: Market Failure or Government Failure?” is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com (and Amazon.co.uk). Did you order it!? Needless to say I have ordered my version and hope it will arrive in my mailbox sometime around my birthday in early March!

Here is that official book description:

“Since publication of Robert L. 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 2008-2009 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 19th and first half of the 20th 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 2008-2009 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.”

I am very much looking forward to reading this book that I am pretty sure will have a very significant impact on the understanding of the causes of the Great Recession among economists and is likely to become a piece that economic historians will study in the future.

If you can’t wait then I recommend you to read Hetzel’s fantastic paper on the causes of the Great Recession: “Monetary Policy in the 2008–2009 Recession”