In the Annales, he wrote: “The destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation. At last, the emperor interposed his aid by distributing throughout the banks a hundred million sesterces, and allowing freedom to borrow without interest for three years, provided the borrower gave security to the State in land to double the amount. Credit was thus restored, and gradually private lenders were found.” 1 Replace “emperor” with “governments and central banks”, “sesterces” with “dollars” or “euro”, “security” with “collateral”: this two thousand year old quotation could sound surprisingly familiar. Yet, even though two thousand years have passed, with many financial debacles in between, I think it is fair to say that we entered the current crisis less than ideally prepared. First, we had to improvise with an economic interpretation of the causes that led to those unprecedented market disruptions. The dramatic fall in confidence revealed a source of risk that macroeconomists had not modelled carefully and that had not even been considered relevant by most theorists of finance. Now, the concept of “systemic risk” is almost common knowledge. Second, we had thought that the financial system would act as a shock absorber. Portfolio theory had demonstrated that the dispersion of individual risks would attenuate aggregate risk. But the mispricing of risk multiplied exposures, and the assumption of similar risks by market participants increased the potential for contagion. In the event, we learned that dispersion does not necessarily mean effective diversification.

Federal and State funding of subsidized higher education is heavily reliant on tax revenues and competes with other forms of public spending, and within education budgets competes with pre-school, elementary and secondary education spending. During the recession we saw severe revenue declines at the federal and state levels. Being highly credit constrained, with university subsidies being part of operating budgets which must be funded with current tax revenues, many states cut planned education funding while allowing public universities to increase tuition levels. This in turn contributed to a significant shift of education cost to students and parents. In research conducted at the New York Fed, we found that since 2007 those states with the largest funding cuts also had the highest tuition increases, with an average annual tuition growth rate of 3.4 percent. As shown in Chart 2, this compares to an annual average tuition growth rate of 1.7 percent during the 2007–2010 period for all other states combined. That is, we observe an economically meaningful relationship between public funding and public institution tuition changes since 2007. Higher tuition has forced many students to take on larger student loans. Student debt and tuition increases were not limited to public institutions. Research conducted at the NYFed found that over the same period there was even larger tuition and student loan growth at forprofit institutions. [Chart 3] Despite larger average support through Pell grants, with tuition  1  National Center for Educational Statistics, 2012. “Digest of Education Statistics”. 2  College Board, 2013.