Minsky Revisited

Olivier Blanchard says,

mainstream macroeconomics had taken the financial system for granted. The typical macro treatment of finance was a set of arbitrage equations, under the assumption that we did not need to look at who was doing what on Wall Street. That turned out to be badly wrong. . .

…As a result of the crisis, a hundred intellectual flowers are blooming. Some are very old flowers: Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis. . .

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

I have just finished a first reading of a review copy of L. Randall Wray’s forthcoming Why Minsky Matters. It is certain to be on my list of best books of the year. In my opinion, Wray succeeds in clarifying Minsky and in making his views more interesting and persuasive to me than they were previously (I still have my quarrels).

If I think about the economy in terms of patterns of specialization and trade, then Minsky thought of it in terms of financial intermediation. For Minsky, all of us are intermediaries. Because we do not barter, we trade either by issuing IOU’s or by passing along the IOU’s of others (fiat currency being an IOU of the government, if you will).

I am working on a review, which probably will not be out before the book.

2 thoughts on “Minsky Revisited

  1. Just wanted to drop a note, no need to reply or acknowledge, to express my appreciation for your blog and your posts which I have followed for many years. A fan letter serves a positive purpose: it is hoped that the recipient values the feedback, particularly of the positive kind, and the anonymous admirer gets to feel that the exchange isn’t solely one way, even if widely imbalanced. Thank you.

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