2nd Edition

Business Cycles

By Lars Tvede Copyright 2001

    Why do we experience business cycles? What creates them? Is it mass psychology, or phenomena in the management of business? Are the banks to blame or should we be looking to the unions and the politicians? Lars Tvede's story moves back in time to the Scottish gambler and financial genius, John Law, and then on to the distracted Adam Smith, the stockbroker Ricardo, the investment banker Thornton, the extrovert Schumpeter, the speculator Jay Gould and many others. The computer jugglers of the modern day, with giant networks of equations, try to solve the same questions that have attracted the attention of classical economists throughout the centuries. Throughout this volume, business cycle theories are used to explain actual events. Theoretical thinking has reflected the economist's own experiences of hyper-inflations, depressions, speculation orgies and liquidity squeezes. The reader can follow the narrative to discover how economists often thought that problems had been solved until new data changed the economic picture once again.

    I: The Discovery of Business Cycles; 1: Paper Money; 2: Cash Payment; 3: The First Economists; 4: From Crash to Crash; 5: Five Pioneers; II: The First Business Cycle Theories; 6: The Archaeologists; 7: Fisher, Babson and the Quantity Theory of Money; 8: Keynes and Von Mises; 9: The Great Depression; 10: Schumpeter's Synthesis; III: A Hidden World; 11: The Simulators; 12: Brains of Steel; 13: The Discovery of Deterministic Chaos; 14: Instability and Money; IV: Business Cycles and Asset Prices; 15: Asset Prices and Liquidity; 16: Maelstroms and Master Minds; 17: War Games; 18: Trends, Turbo-Chargers and Turning Points; 19: Milton Friedman's “Trilemma”; V: Growing Up; 20: Booms and Bubbles of the Nineties; 21: The Puzzle-Solvers; VI: The Beat of the Heart

    Biography

    Lars Tvede