The Swedish Central Bank’s (the “Bank”) prize in economics has gone to Jean Tirole. It is always good to test such an award by looking at the writings of the recipient in an area in which the reader has particular expertise. In my case, that would include the Savings and Loan debacle, financial regulation, and control fraud. Tirole’s book: The Theory of Corporate Finance was published on January 1, 2006 during the heart of the three raging epidemics of accounting control fraud that were hyper-inflating the world’s largest financial bubble and about to create the financial crisis and the Great Recession.
As I have long emphasized and will be explaining at greater length in a book about the failures of economics and economists as exemplified by far too many of the recipients of the Bank’s Prize, economics is the only discipline in which the understanding of the field’s subject of study has gone backwards. In particular, the praxis recommended by economists has proven highly criminogenic and is the primary explanation for why we suffer recurrent, intensifying crises, the rise of crony capitalism that cripples democracy and ethics, and spiraling inequality and low growth in the regions that suffer the greatest predation by our parasitical financial centers. Tirole wrote at the ideal time to judge his understanding of corporate finance as it was actively causing these catastrophes.
