The Federal Reserve's response to the current financial crisis has been praised because it introduced a zero interest rate policy more rapidly than the Bank of Japan (during the Japanese crisis of the 1990s) and embraced massive "quantitative easing". However, despite vast capital injections,...

The term BRIC was first coined by Goldman Sachs and refers to the fast-growing developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China - a class of middle-income emerging market economies of relatively large size that are capable of self-sustained expansion. Their combined economies could...

The stability of the international reserve currency's purchasing power is less a question of what serves as that currency and more a question of the international adjustment mechanism, as well as the compatibility of export-led development strategies with international payment balances....

In this brief, Senior Scholar Jan Kregel reviews Hyman P. Minsky's concept of financial fragility - in short, that the structure of a capitalist economy becomes more fragile over a period of prosperity - and concludes that the current crisis is in fact the result of insufficient margins of...

The purpose of the 1933 Banking Act-aka Glass-Steagall-was to prevent the exposure of commercial banks to the risks of investment banking and to ensure stability of the financial system. A proposed solution to the current financial crisis is to return to the basic tenets of this New Deal...

Before the law has even been fully implemented, the inadequacies of the regulatory approach underlying the Dodd-Frank Act are becoming more and more apparent. Financial scandal by financial scandal, the realization is hardening that there is a pressing need to search for more robust regulatory...

In the context of the eurozone's sovereign debt crisis and the US subprime mortgage crisis, Senior Scholar Jan Kregel looks at the question of how we ought to distribute losses between borrowers and lenders in cases of debt resolution. Kregel tackles a prominent approach to this question that is...

In the context of current debates about the proper form of prudential regulation and proposals for the imposition of liquidity and capital ratios, Senior Scholar Jan Kregel examines Hyman Minsky's work as a consultant to government agencies exploring financial regulatory reform in the 1960s. As...

Emerging market economies are taking an ill-targeted and far too limited approach to addressing their ongoing problems with the international financial system, according to Senior Scholar Jan Kregel. In this policy brief, he explains why only a wholesale reform of the international financial...