The Bubble, the Crunch, and the Great Recession

Why was the Great Recession so deep? Certainly, the collapse of the housing bubble was the key precipitating event; falling house prices depressed consumer wealth and spending while leading to sharp reductions in residential construction. However, as I argue in a new paper and blog post, the most damaging aspect of the unwinding bubble was that it ultimately touched off a broad-based financial panic, including runs on wholesale funding and indiscriminate fire sales of even non-mortgage credit. The panic in turn choked off credit supply, pushing the economy into a much more severe decline than otherwise would have occurred. My evidence for this claim is that indicators of panic, including the sharp increases in funding costs for financial institutions and the spiking yields on securitized non-mortgage assets, are strikingly better predictors of the timing and depth of the recession than are housing-related variables such as house prices, market pricing of subprime mortgages, or mortgage delinquency rates.