tailieunhanh - Financial Intermediation and Credit Policy in Business Cycle Analysis∗

In this view of the saving-investment nexus, aggregate credit expansion comes before saving. The process of credit-expansion here starts with the wish of an entrepreneur to get some means of payment to invest into some new equipment or simply to buy intermediary products or hire workers in order to star, expand or start production. The financial system with the support of the central bank then expands the money supply ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) and lends the newly created liquidity to the firms. Money is then used by the entrepreneur to hire workers and buy material for new production. As. | Financial Intermediation and Credit Policy in Business Cycle Analysis Mark Gertler and Nobuhiro Kiyotaki . and Princeton October 2009 This version March 2010 Abstract We develop a canonical framework to think about credit market frictions and aggregate economic activity in the context of the current crisis. We use the framework to address two issues in particular first how disruptions in financial intermediation can induce a crisis that affects real activity and second how various credit market interventions by the central bank and the Treasury of the type we have seen recently might work to mitigate the crisis. We make use of earlier literature to develop our framework and characterize how very recent literature is incorporating insights from the crisis. Prepared for the Handbook of Monetary Economics. Thanks to Michael Woodford Larry Christiano Simon Gilchrist Chris Erceg and Ian Dew-Becker for helpful comments. Thanks also to Albert Queralto Olive for excellent research assistance. 1 1 Introduction To motivate interest in a paper on financial factors in business fluctuations it use to be necessary to appeal either to the Great Depression or to the experiences of many emerging market economies. This is no longer necessary. Over the past few years the United States and much of the industrialized world have experienced the worst financial crisis of the post-war. The global recession that has followed also appears to have been the most severe of this era. At the time of this writing there is evidence that the financial sector has stabilized and the real economy has stopped contracting and output growth has resumed. The path to full recovery however remains highly uncertain. The timing of recent events though poses a challenge for writing a Handbook chapter on credit market frictions and aggregate economic activity. It is true that over the last several decades there has been a robust literature in this area. Bernanke Gertler and Gilchrist BGG 1999 surveyed much