The Handbook of the Political Economy of Financial Crises

The Great Financial Crisis that began in 2007-2008 reminds us with devastating force that financial instability and crises are endemic to capitalist economies that lack powerful and dynamically changing financial regulations that can keep the powerful forces of leverage and credit within sustainable bounds. Economists from Marx to Keynes, and Minsky to Kindleberger have well understood this profoundly important fact, yet the dominant mainstream economics of "rational expectations", "efficient markets" and "laissez-faire" that rationalized widespread financial liberalization and still dominates the economics profession has gotten it, literally, "dead wrong". The Handbook of The Political Economy of Financial Crises describes the theoretical, institutional, and historical factors that can help us understand the forces that create financial crises - with an emphasis on the crisis of 2007- 2008 - and the strengths and weaknesses of varying theoretical perspectives and policy approaches that have tried to comprehend and limit these financial tsunamis.

Gerald A. Epstein is Professor of Economics and a founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 1981. Epstein has written articles on numerous topics including financial regulation, alternative approaches to central banking for employment generation and poverty reduction, and capital account management and capital flows. Epstein is the co-founder of SAFER, a group of economists and other analysts who have been involved in the debate over financial restructuring and reform in the United States.

Martin H. Wolfson is the Director of the Higgins Labor Studies Program. He has taught economics at the University of Notre Dame since 1989. Before that, he was an economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C.
His research investigates the effects on working people of financial markets, macroeconomic policy, globalization, and local economic development. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Community Forum for Economic Development, a local organization in South Bend whose mission is to promote social and economic equity and to increase the living standards and opportunities of local residents.