The 2008 World Financial Crisis and Market Quality Theory^*

The present study demonstrates that the current world financial crisis is attributable to, among other things, the failure to coordinate Japanese and U.S. monetary policies in 2004, allowing Japan to abandon its currency intervention while pegging its interest rate at zero at the same time that the United States departed from its low interest rate policy. At a deeper level, these factors can be explained by the productivity increases resulting from the internet technology revolution, which lowered market quality by rendering obsolete the market infrastructure built in the latter half of the twentieth century.