MACROECONOMIC POLICY CONTEXT OF SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE CURRENT GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS

The objective of the article is to identify similarities and differences between the Great Depression and global financial and economic crises in period 2007 – 2010. The analysis examines a hypothesis that the main causes of financial and economic crises include unbalanced developments of the macroeconomic sphere as well as existing weaknesses of banking systems, which often do not evolve in line with the development of economy fundamentals. The article is going to inspect three areas: (i) What economic policies and trends were registered in the pre-crisis period in order to identify the main causes of economic fluctuations; (ii) How economic policies responded to the course of the financial and economic crisis; (iii) What was the effect of financial crisis on the real economy development. The main task for after-crisis periods is to improve stabilization of macroeconomic policy, bank risk management system and also system for monitoring and analysing the business cycle.