Pethokoukis: Fed Caused Great Recession, Not Bushonomics

So says a new book by Robert Hetzel, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. James Pethokoukis at AEI gets in the economic weeds so we don't have to.  He writes:

The president argues that it was the unchecked, reckless, casino capitalism of the George W. Bush years — bank deregulation, tax cuts for the rich — that lead to the nation’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And if Mitt Romney is elected in November, the Republican will bring those policies right back, risking another financial collapse.

But a book by Robert Hetzel, a senior economist at Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, says it wasn’t Bushonomics or greedy bankers or broken markets that caused the Great Recession. In The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure, Hetzel pins the blame squarely on the Federal Reserve and Team Bernanke.

Oh, the downturn first started with “correction of an excess in the housing stock and a sharp increase in energy prices” — the housing bust and the oil shock. Indeed, those two things were enough, in Hetzel’s view, to cause a “moderate recession” beginning in December 2007.

But only a moderate one. It was the Fed’s monetary policy miscues after the downturn began that turned a run-of-the-mill downturn into a once-in-a century disaster...

The irony here, of course, is that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a much-noted student of the Great Depression and of the work of the late Milton Friedman whose landmark book, A Monetary History of the United States, pinned the blame for the Great Depression on a too tight Fed. As Bernanke told Friedman and his co-author, Anna Schwartz, on the economist’s 90th birthday a decade ago, ”You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

But if Hetzel is right, the Fed blew it again.

The analysis will be much debated and probably won’t have much impact on the election or public perception of the Bush years anytime soon. And bankers are unlikely to see their approval ratings rise. But Hetzel’s work suggests policymakers should take notice and perhaps think twice about placing more faith and power in regulators or abandoning pro-market polices because they somehow caused the financial crisis and Great Recession.