I review The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King, published by W.W. Norton and Company in 2016. I discuss King's proposed regulatory reform, the ‘Pawn Broker for All Seasons' (PFAS) and I compare it to an alternative solution developed in my own work. I argue that unregulated trade in the financial...

This paper argues that the stock market crash of 2008, triggered by a collapse in house prices, caused the Great Recession. The paper has three parts. First, it provides evidence of a high correlation between the value of the stock market and the unemployment rate in U.S. data since 1929....

This paper develops a rational expectations model with multiple equilibrium unemployment rates where the price of capital may be unbounded above. I argue that this property is an important feature of any rational-agent explanation of a financial crisis, since for the expansion phase of the...

This paper has three parts. Part 1 constructs a classical economic model of inflation, augmented by a complete set of financial markets; I call this the core monetary model. Part 2 develops a series of calibrated examples to illustrate how the core monetary model explains the history of...

This paper studies the connection between the stock market and the unemployment rate. I establish three facts. First, the log of the real value of the S&P 500 and the log of a logistic transformation of the unemployment rate are non-stationary cointegrated series. Second, the stock market...