An incisive overview of the macroeconomics of financial crises—essential reading for students and policy experts alike With alarming frequency, modern economies go through macro-financial crashes that arise from the financial sector and spread to the broader economy, inflicting deep and prolonged recessions. A Crash Course on Crises brings together the latest cutting-edge economic research to identify the seeds of these crashes, reveal their triggers and consequences, and explain what policymakers can do about them. Each of the book’s ten self-contained chapters introduces readers to a key economic force and provides case studies that illustrate how that force was dominant. Markus Brunnermeier and Ricardo Reis show how the run-up phase of a crisis often occurs in ways that are preventable but that may go unnoticed and discuss how debt contracts, banks, and a search for safety can act as triggers and amplifiers that drive the economy to crash. Brunnermeier and Reis then explain how monetary, fiscal, and exchange-rate policies can respond to crises and prevent them from becoming persistent. With case studies ranging from Chile in the 1970s to the COVID-19 pandemic, A Crash Course on Crises synthesizes a vast literature into ten simple, accessible ideas and illuminates these concepts using novel diagrams and a clear analytical framework.
Authors
A heteronym of Fernando Pessoa. "Around 1912, if I’m not mistaken (not greatly anyway), the idea came to me to write poems of a pagan nature. So I scribbled something down in irregular verse (different to the style of Álvaro de Campos, more irregular), and abandoned the idea. It was a badly woven twilight, a blurred portrait of the person who was composing it. (I hadn’t realized it yet, but that was when Ricardo Reis was born)." Fernando Pessoa writes in his letter dated Janeiro 13th 1935 to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, that Ricardo Reis was born in 1887 (although he couldn’t recall the exact date), in Oporto. He describes him as shorter, stronger and stiffer than Caeiro, besides being clean shaven. He had had a Jesuit school education, was a doctor and had lived in Brazil since 1919, from where he had been self-expatriated for being a supporter of the monarchy. He had Latin and semi-Hellenic instruction. Fernando Pessoa admits he conferred to this heteronym and excessive purity and writing as Ricardo Reis mentions he "followed an abstract deliberation which immediately took the shape of an ode". Source: Fernando Pessoa's Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, January 13th 1935, in Correspondência 1923-1935, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva, Lisbon Assírio & Alvim, 1999.
