Anat Admati on the Perils of Corporate Debt and How COVID-19 Relief Efforts Have Gone Wrong

Anat Admati is a professor of finance and economics at Stanford University, and is well-known for her work on leveraging debt in our financial system and how it makes our economy more susceptible to shocks. She’s also a co-author of the popular book, *The Banker’s New Clothes: What Went Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It*. Anat joins Macro Musings again to talk about the COVID-19 crisis from the debt perspective, how the Fed and Congress have responded so far, and how their relief efforts should have been focused differently.      The transcript for the episode can be found here.   Anat’s Twitter: @anatadmati Anat’s website: https://admati.people.stanford.edu/   Related Links:   Bonus segment with Anat: https://youtu.be/4xHmmgoURqg   *The Banker’s New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It* by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691162386/the-bankers-new-clothes   *The Leverage Ratchet Effect* by Anat Admati, Peter DeMarzo, Martin Hellwig, and Paul Pfleiderer https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jofi.12588   *Macrofinancial History and the New Business Cycle Facts* by Oscar Jorda, Mortiz Schularick, and Alan Taylor https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/wp2016-23.pdf   *Coronavirus Crisis Lays Bare the Risks of Financial Leverage, Again” by Martin Wolf https://www.ft.com/content/098dcd60-8880-11ea-a01c-a28a3e3fbd33   *House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again* by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo20832545.html   *Collateral Frameworks: The Open Secret of Central Banks* by Kjell Nyborg https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/collateral-frameworks/DE8BACD87F364A66DD496F601BE92FE7   *Bankruptcy for Banks: A Sound Concept That Needs Fine-Tuning* by Mark Roe and David Skeel https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/business/dealbook/bankruptcy-for-banks-a-sound-concept-that-needs-fine-tuning.html   David’s blog: macromarketmusings.blogspot.com David’s Twitter: @DavidBeckworth