This paper takes off from Jan Kregel's paper 'Shylock and Hamlet, or Are There Bulls and Bears in the Circuit?' (1986), which aimed to remedy shortcomings in most expositions of the circuit approach. While some circuitistes have rejected John Maynard Keynes's liquidity preference theory, Kregel...

This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which...

Most mainstream neoclassical economists completely failed to anticipate the crisis which broke in 2007 and 2008. There is however a long tradition of economic analysis which emphasises how growth in a capitalist economy leads to an accumulation of tensions and results in periodic crises. This...

Friedrich August von Hayek hat der Nachwelt ein breites theoretisches Werk hinterlassen. Ein durchgängiger Wesenszug darin ist sein spezifischer Liberalismus, der durch einen negativen Begriff von Freiheit bestimmt ist. Damit verbunden ist Hayeks ausgeprägter methodologischer Individualismus....

This paper compares Marx's economics with those by Sraffa, Keynes, Kalecki and Minsky. The paper takes an "ex post" view on the matter and rather looks at the output side of the respective authors, but not at the input side. This means no attempt is made at studying in a systematic way, if and...

The term 'Institutional Economics' has been applied to some of capitalism's strongest critics as well as its most ardent apologists. This paradox in terms has bred contradictory literature in development economics, some declaring the death of this line of thought while others herald its...

Should shocks be part of our macro-modeling tool kit - for example, as a way of modeling discontinuities in fiscal policy or big moves in the financial markets? What are shocks, and how can we best put them to use? In heterodox macroeconomics, shocks tend to come in two broad types, with some...

In the aftermath of the global financial collapse that began in 2007, governments around the world have responded with reform. The outlines of Basel III have been announced, although some have already dismissed its reform agenda as being too little (and too late!). Like the proposed reforms in...

The world's worst economic crisis since the 1930s is now well into its third year. All sorts of explanations have been proffered for the causes of the crisis, from lax regulation and oversight to excessive global liquidity. Unfortunately, these narratives do not take into account the systemic...

Stability is destabilizing. These three words concisely capture the insight that underlies Hyman Minsky's analysis of the economy's transformation over the entire postwar period. The basic thesis is that the dynamic forces of a capitalist economy are explosive and must be contained by...