After the Crash

This book analyzes in a new way the causes of the current crash by showing how such events derive from real estate bubbles and their interactions with banks and other lenders.

• Analyzes the current crisis of the real estate crash and explains the recurring cycle which led to it
• Examines why frequent assessments are crucial to making the property tax an effective method of preventing speculative real estate bubbles
• Combines theoretical analysis with observed cycles of land speculation to demonstrate the impact on the modern economy

Frontispiece Portrait of Mason Gaffney.

Editor's Introduction (Clifford W. Cobb).

1. The Role of Land Markets in Economic Crises (Mason Gaffney).

2. A New Framework for Macroeconomics: Achieving Full Employment by Increasing Capital Turnover (Mason Gaffney).

3. Money, Credit, and Crisis (Mason Gaffney ).

Index.

"Gaffney has been publishing vital contributions to economics since his PhD dissertation in 1956." (Sun Life Financial, November 2009)

Mason Gaffney has been a professor of economics at the University of California, Riverside for the past 33 years. He is the author of The Corruption of Economics, an explanation of how land became excluded from neoclassical economic models. He has also written extensively on various aspects of resource economics, urban economics, tax policy, and capital theory.

This book analyzes in a new way the causes of the current crash by showing how such events derive from real estate bubbles and their interactions with banks and other lenders. It explains the current crisis, but in the process, the author develops a general theory of capital (drawing on Wicksell) showing how excessive investing in durable capital of slow payback can destabilize and then freeze up a modern economy, which requires constant circulation and renewal of capital to function. Combining that analysis with observed cycles of land speculation, Gaffney shows how a “perfect storm” formed and now has overwhelmed the economy.