Uf, tale intervju z novopečenim nobelovcem Eugenom Famo (University of Chicago) v New Yorkerju si morate prebrati. Nujno. In v celoti. Spodaj navajam samo nekaj najbolj sočnih izjav.

Gospod Fama je razumevanje sedanje finančne krize postavil na glavo. Gospodarska kriza se ni začela zaradi balona na kapitalskem trgu. Nasprotno, najprej je bila gospodarska kriza (zaradi kateregakoli razloga, ki ga še ne poznamo), zaradi katere nekateri niso več mogli odplačevati kreditov, kar je izzvalo kreditno krizo in za seboj potegnilo v prepad finančne trge zaradi znižanja vrednosti sredstev. V resnici so finančni trgi žrtve te krize.

Brez heca. Zanimivo bo videti odzive ostalih ekonomistov širom sveta na to inovativno teorijo nastanka sedanje gospodarske krize. In seveda gledati obraze ljudi, ki bodo prisotni ob podelitvi Nobelove nagrade in poslušali zahvalni govor gospoda Fame.

John Cassidy: Are you saying that bubbles can’t exist?

Eugene Fama: They have to be predictable phenomena. I don’t think any of this was particularly predictable.

John Cassidy: Is it not true that in the credit markets people were getting loans, especially home loans, which they shouldn’t have been getting?

Eugene Fama: That was government policy; that was not a failure of the market. The government decided that it wanted to expand home ownership. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were instructed to buy lower grade mortgages.

John Cassidy: But Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of subprime mortgages were pretty small compared to the market as a whole, perhaps twenty or thirty per cent.

Eugene Fama: (Laughs) Well, what does it take?

…

John Cassidy: So what is your explanation of what happened?

Eugene Fama: What happened is we went through a big recession, people couldn’t make their mortgage payments, and, of course, the ones with the riskiest mortgages were the most likely not to be able to do it. As a consequence, we had a so-called credit crisis. It wasn’t really a credit crisis. It was an economic crisis.

John Cassidy: But surely the start of the credit crisis predated the recession?

Eugene Fama: I don’t think so. How could it? People don’t walk away from their homes unless they can’t make the payments. That’s an indication that we are in a recession.

John Cassidy: So you are saying the recession predated August 2007, when the subprime bond market froze up?

Eugene Fama: Yeah. It had to, to be showing up among people who had mortgages. Nobody who’s doing mortgage research—we have lots of them here—disagrees with that.

John Cassidy: So what caused the recession if it wasn’t the financial crisis?

Eugene Fama: (Laughs) That’s where economics has always broken down. We don’t know what causes recessions. Now, I’m not a macroeconomist so I don’t feel bad about that. (Laughs again.) We’ve never known. Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.

John Cassidy: Let me get this straight, because I don’t want to misrepresent you. Your view is that in 2007 there was an economic recession coming on, for whatever reason, which was then reflected in the financial system in the form of lower asset prices?

Eugene Fama: Yeah. What was really unusual was the worldwide fall in real estate prices.

John Cassidy: So, you get a recession, for whatever reason, that leads to a worldwide fall in house prices, and that leads to a financial collapse…

Eugene Fama: Of the mortgage market… What’s the reality now? Everybody talks about a credit crisis. The variance of stock returns for the market as a whole went up to, like, sixty per cent a year—the Vix measure of volatility was running at about sixty per cent. What that implies is not a credit market crisis. It would be stupid for anybody to give credit in those circumstances, because the probability that any borrower is going to be gone within a year is pretty high. In an efficient market, you would expect that debt would shorten up. Any new debt would be very short-term until that volatility went down.

John Cassidy: But what is driving that volatility?

Eugene Fama: (Laughs) Again, its economic activity—the part we don’t understand. So the fact we don’t understand it means there’s a lot of uncertainty about how bad it really is. That creates all kinds of volatility in financial prices, and bonds are no longer a viable form of financing.

John Cassidy: And all that is consistent with market efficiency?

Eugene Fama: Yes. It is exactly how you would expect the market to work.

…

John Cassidy: In the past, I think you have been quoted as saying that you don’t even believe in the possibility of bubbles.

Eugene Fama: I never said that. I want people to use the term in a consistent way. For example, I didn’t renew my subscription to The Economist because they use the world bubble three times on every page. Any time prices went up and down—I guess that is what they call a bubble. People have become entirely sloppy. People have jumped on the bandwagon of blaming financial markets. I can tell a story very easily in which the financial markets were a casualty of the recession, not a cause of it.

John Cassidy: That’s your view, correct?

Eugene Fama: Yeah.

Vir: The New Yorker (povzeto po Brad DeLong)