While most economists agree that the world is facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, there is little agreement as to what caused it. Some have argued that the financial instability we are witnessing is due to irrational exuberance of market participants, fraud, greed, too...

In this paper, I first quickly recount the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis (GFC). Of course, the triggering event was the unfolding of the subprime crisis; however, I argue that the financial system was already so fragile that just about anything could have caused the...

This paper examines the views of Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner on the functional finance approach to fiscal policy. It argues that the main principles of functional finance were relatively widely held in the immediate postwar period. However, with the rise of the Phillips curve, the return of the...