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...

In this paper I will follow Hyman Minsky in arguing that the postwar period has seen a slow transformation of the economy from a structure that could be characterized as "robust" to one that is "fragile." While many economists and policymakers have argued that "no one saw it coming," Minsky and...

Within the economic theory different notions of time imply alternative analytical structures. This article discusses and rejects the methodological dichotomy between ‘temporal' and ‘a-temporal' models (equilibrium and disequilibrium models) in economics. Different notions of time are...

This paper surveys the context and contours of contemporary Post-Keynesian Institutionalism (PKI). It begins by reviewing recent criticism of conventional economics by prominent economists as well as examining, within the current context, important research that paved the way for PKI. It then...

Macroeconomics must take radical uncertainty into account, if it aims at contributing to the solution of serious real-world problems such as climate change. Allowing for radical uncertainty must happen at two levels: the level of modeling and the level of the scientific discipline. I argue that...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the Great Moderation was caused by either good policy, good luck (favourable shocks), more efficient private sector behaviour (such as better inventory management), or more effective financial innovations. We show that it may, instead, have originated from the...

Both sides in the U.S. Civil War financed military spending by issuing new fiat currencies. The Union “greenback” underwent moderate inflation (by wartime standards), but the Confederate “grayback” suffered hyperinflation. Existing explanations for these price movements typically treat...

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing discussions on the nature of money by introducing systematic analysis to relate power to money. It proposes an Ideal Type to explain the critical role of power relations for the genesis and operation of money and monetary order. It is based on the...

The present paper examines attribute substitution in terms of both heuristics and attribution theory in social psychology. Alternative “old” approaches in psychology were special because they considered choice in terms that were similar to attributional inference in social psychology and...

In the November/December 2021 issue of Intereconomics, Françoise Drumetz and Christian Pfister examine Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and approach it from the policy consequences that would follow. This paper is a reply to Drumetz and Pfister. It restates the core of MMT and offers some...