The outstanding economist Hyman Minsky was always skeptical of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. It assumed, he wrote, that economic growth itself would be adequate to eliminate poverty. But Minsky believed that there were structural problems that always left too many people without jobs or with...

At a time when small businesses are suffering from a credit crunch, quot;nichequot; financial institutions increasingly are filling the void left by more traditional sources of financing, such as commercial banks. In this working paper, authors Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Ronnie J. Phillips, and...

This paper uses Hyman P. Minsky's approach to analyze the current international financial crisis that was initiated by problems in the U.S. real estate market. In a 1987 manuscript, Minsky had already recognized the importance of the trend toward securitization of home mortgages. This paper...

This paper provides an analysis of Keynes's original quot;Bancorquot; proposal as well as more recent proposals for fixed exchange rates. We argue that these schemes fail to pay due attention to the importance of capital movements in today's economy, and that they implicitly adopt an...

This paper briefly summarizes the orthodox approach to banking, finance, and money, and then points the way toward an alternative based on socioeconomics. It argues that the alternative approach is better fitted to not only the historical record, but also sheds more light on the nature of money...

There are various explanations for the economic fluctuations that occur in all capitalist economies. Sometimes the cause is an irrational mania, a speculative scheme, or (according to Monetarists) an quot;exogenous shockquot; precipitated by the central bank. Others Marx, for example attribute...

The Community Development Banks (CDBs) should not be seen as a substitute for the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) or for other programs designed to revitalize lower income areas. Rather, they should be seen as a complement for existing programs and for other programs that will be proposed by...

All modern economies have a quot;chartalistquot; or quot;statequot; money, as acknowledged by Friedrich Knapp and J.M. Keynes. In this paper, I examine the quot;historyquot; of money to shed light on its origins. I also examine in detail the views of those who accepted the chartalist, or state,...

In this paper we present a theory of the financing of investment in a modern capitalist economy, following the approach developed by Hyman P. Minsky. We argue that the current financial crisis that began with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the United States in 2007 provides a...

Before we can reform the financial system, we need to understand what banks do—or, better yet, what banks should do. Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray examines Hyman Minsky’s views on banking and the proper role of the financial system—not simply to finance investment in physical capital but...