This ambitious book seeks both to revive and revise the idea of ‘functional finance'. Followers of this doctrine believe that government budgets should concentrate solely on their macroeconomic impact on the economy, rather than reflecting a concern for sound finance and budgetary discipline....

Most OECD economies have suffered from persistently high unemployment since the mid-1970s as a result of demand deficiencies promoted by inappropriate fiscal and monetary policy. Governments have failed to understand the opportunities that they have as the issuer of the currency. In this paper,...

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...

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...