While the mainstream long argued that the central bank could use quantitative constraints as a means to controlling the private creation of money, most economists now recognize that the central bank can only set the overnight interest ratewhich has only an indirect impact on the quantity of...

The sharp exchanges that Keynes had with some of his critics on the loanable funds theory made it harder to appreciate the degree to which his thought was continuous with the tradition of monetary analysis that emanates from Wicksell, of which Keynes's A Treatise on Money was a part. In the...

Walter Bagehot's putative principles of lending in liquidity crises - to lend freely to solvent banks with good collateral but at penalty rates - have served as a theoretical basis for thinking about the lender of last resort for close to 100 years, while simultaneously providing justification...

This paper advances three fundamental propositions regarding money: (1) As R. W. Clower (1965) famously put it, money buys goods and goods buy money, but goods do not buy goods. (2) Money is always debt; it cannot be a commodity from the first proposition because, if it were, that would mean...

The global financial crisis has now spread across multiple countries and sectors, affecting both financial and real spheres in the advanced as well as the developing economies. This has been caused by policies based on "rational expectation" models that advocate deregulated finance, with...

In this paper, I examine whether Hyman P. Minsky adopted an endogenous money approach in his early work - at the time that he was first developing his financial instability approach. In an earlier piece (Wray 1992), I closely examined Minsky's published writings to support the argument that,...

The 2007-8 global financial crisis has shown the failure of private finance to efficiently allocate capital to finance real capital development. The resilience and stability of Brazil’s financial system has received attention, since it navigated relatively smoothly through the Great Recession...

Many of the claims put forth by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) center around the state's monopoly over its own currency. In this paper I interrogate the plausibility of two claims: 1) MMT's theory of the price level - that the price level is a function of prices paid by government when it spends -...

The paper seeks to lay out a stock-flow-based theoretical framework that provides a foundation for a general theory of pricing. Contemporary marginalist economics is usually based on the assumption that prices are set in line with the value placed on goods by consumers. It does not take into...

Starting from the mid-nineteenth century, this paper analyzes two periods of financial instability connected with financial globalization. The first culminates with the 1929 crisis, while the second characterizes the more recent experience starting from the 1970s. The period in between is...