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The next Minsky conference in the Levy Institute’s international series is taking place in Athens next week, November 8-9. The central theme, as you can probably guess from the location, is the ongoing eurozone crisis. This conference is organized as part of the Levy Institute’s international research agenda and in conjunction with the Ford Foundation Project on Financial Instability, which draws on Hyman Minsky’s extensive work on the structure of financial systems to ensure stability and the role of government in achieving a growing and equitable economy. Among the key topics the conference will address are: the challenges to global growth and employment posed by the continuing eurozone debt crisis; the impact of austerity on output and employment; the ramifications of the credit crunch for economic and financial markets; the larger implications of government deficits and debt crises for US and European economic policies; and central bank independence and financial reform. Keynote speakers will include Már Gudmundsson, governor of the Central Bank of Iceland (“Iceland’s Crisis and Recovery: Are There Lessons for the Eurozone and Its Member Countries?”), Yves Mersch, member of the ECB’s Executive Board and General Council (“Intergenerational Justice in Times of Sovereign Debt Crises”), and Lord Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick (“The Experience of Austerity: The UK”). You can find… Read More

Here’s a piece I wrote with Yolanda Fernandez for the Asian Development Bank: Monetary and Fiscal Operations in the People’s Republic of China: An Alternative View of the Options Available You’ve no doubt read various analyses predicting the impending collapse of the Chinese financial sector, and arguments that China cannot continue to grow at a rapid pace. While we do think that China faces some challenges, we part company with the gloom and doom crowd. What most of them do not understand is that China is a sovereign country that issues its own currency. Affordability is not an issue. China has the fiscal capacity to resolve any financial crisis, and it can “afford” to grow fast if it chooses to do so. Our paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to the PRC as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. The paper first summarizes a number of issues facing the PRC, including the possibility of slower growth and a number of domestic imbalances. Then, it analyzes current monetary and fiscal policy formation and examines some policy recommendations that have been advanced to deal with current areas of concern. The paper outlines the sovereign currency approach and uses it to analyze those concerns. Against this background, it is recommended that the central government’s fiscal stance… Read More

Larry Summers recently noted that the projected long-term budget deficit for the federal government basically disappears if we’re able to achieve annual economic growth rates that are 0.2 percentage points higher than the Congressional Budget Office assumes. The notion that eliminating the budget deficit is a valuable goal in and of itself deserves some pushback. But if you start from the premises of those who do think (or claim to think) there’s a problem with debt levels of the sort projected by the CBO, then debt hawks should be running around promoting any scheme they can think of that will boost growth. If the debt really is as big of a problem as they claim, this ought to be their first priority. And it’s a far better strategy than the current one, which seems to revolve around pushing for an increase in the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare. Now, it’s obviously the case that “push the US political system to pass policies that increase growth” isn’t an easy thing to accomplish, but there are a couple of reasons why this would be a better goal for (genuine) debt hawks to pursue. First, even if the FixtheDebters succeed in getting what they want, which seems to be a particular type of entitlement cut (raising the retirement age counts; reducing… Read More

Dimitri Papadimitriou, Greg Hannsgen, Michalis Nikiforos, and Gennaro Zezza have just published a new strategic analysis for the US economy, with a baseline projection and alternative policy simulations through the end of 2016. The report takes a closer look at the potential payoff of R&D investment in the context of a US export strategy. As Papadimitriou et al. point out, fiscal policy at the federal level is simply stuck on a self-defeating course, with nothing but further growth-killing contraction on the horizon. Their baseline projection shows that if we stay on the current fiscal path, in which the deficit continues to shrink rapidly, growth won’t be high enough to appreciably bring down the unemployment rate — as far out as 2016 unemployment would be just below 7 percent. The significant increases in federal spending that would be needed to accelerate the recovery and quickly bring down the unemployment rate don’t seem to be politically viable, to put it gently. So the authors turn to the external sector; more precisely, to an export-oriented strategy driven by innovation. Research and development may be an area in which a proposed increase in government investment would attract less rabid congressional opposition. And from the authors’ perspective, recent revisions to the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) now allow us to get a better handle… Read More

As is well known, Hyman Minsky was a student of Joseph Schumpeter’s at Harvard. Minsky’s “stages” theory of capitalist development, fleshed out during the later part of his life while he was here at the Levy Institute, arguably owes something to the influence of his former dissertation adviser. There’s a short paper in the archive from 1992, “Schumpeter and Finance” (pdf), in which Minsky presents a tight, clear summary of his vision of the evolution of capitalism and finance, right up to the present-day stage of “money manager capitalism.” You should read it for that reason alone (especially if your acquaintance with Minsky’s work extends only to his “financial instability hypothesis”), but it also contains a short passage that deserves to be quoted on its own, in which Minsky, in the context of a reminiscence of his teacher (“We talked about important things as well as about economics”), insists on the need to approach economics as the study of an “evolutionary beast”: “In 1948–49 the representative graduate student considered Schumpeter to be passé. Paying attention to him, joining him in his study was evidence of a lack of fundamental seriousness, of dilettantism. Given the command of mathematics that economists of that time possessed, Schumpeter’s model was not tractable. As a result his vision was ignored by the candidates striving to… Read More

From part four of Mariana Mazzucato’s “Rethinking the State” series, Riccardo Bellofiore discusses Hyman Minsky’s Schumpeterian spin on the “socialization of investment”: [iframe width=”448″ height=”242″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/rj8vyzWbZh8?feature=player_detailpage” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

I recently returned from a conference in Brazil jointly sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Brazilian research group MINDS. It is part of a bigger project to take Hyman P. Minsky global. In my view, Minsky was hands-down the greatest economist of the second half of the twentieth century and he deserves the attention he’s getting. Watch for an upcoming film by Monty Python’s Terry Jones that will feature Minsky and his work. Minsky will even make an appearance—or, more accurately, a bigger-than-life Minsky puppet will be in the film. (Steve Keen and I were also interviewed.) Minsky the puppet had to travel from England to NY for filming. Question: how do you transport a huge puppet across the Big Pond? Well, you buy him a seat, of course! It would have been worth the price of airfare to be on that flight, buying Minsky a drink. In any event, I’m going to focus my comments around the conference’s kick-off presentation by the always entertaining Paul McCulley, formerly the brains behind PIMCO. I was sitting with Paul right before his talk, during which he apparently put the whole thing together. He asked for three fundamental principles to structure his presentation. In a matter of minutes he came up with three, fleshed them out, and then… Read More

Pavlina Tcherneva was interviewed yesterday on Los Angeles public radio about the ongoing debt ceiling face-off and government shutdown. She referenced Ben Bernanke’s “self-induced paralysis” phrase (which he used to describe Japan’s lost decade) as an accurate description of the current US situation and expressed concern that shutdown and debt ceiling standoffs may represent the new procedural status quo — effectively preventing the government’s fiscal power from operating on any normal basis. (The fact that yesterday’s GOP proposal centered on a mere six-week raise in the debt ceiling — and by some accounts would prevent Treasury from engaging in the “extraordinary measures” it has been using to buy time since bumping up against the debt ceiling — suggests that congressional Republicans may indeed be envisioning permanent hostage budgeting.) Tcherneva also discussed what we might expect from Janet Yellen’s Fed. Based on Yellen’s past testimony and academic work, Tcherneva argued we should see more of a focus on unemployment and employment issues, at least at the level of shaping the policy discourse — there is a separate question, Tcherneva cautioned, as to whether the Fed has the tools to get us to full employment. Listen to or download the interview here.

Some commentators and members of Congress have insisted that failing to raise the debt ceiling would not necessarily require defaulting on the national debt. The theory is that Treasury could prioritize payments to bond holders while defaulting only on commitments to other payees (say, Social Security recipients). Most of the discussion of what might happen if Congress fails to raise the borrowing limit has focused on the financial market consequences of defaulting on the debt. But even if prioritization is possible (there is some debate about whether it’s logistically possible, or even legal), we would still be facing a serious macroeconomic crisis. This is because failing to lift the debt ceiling would require extreme spending cuts some time after October 17. Essentially, the federal government would be forced to balance its budget. (This is all assuming that trillion dollar coins and premium bonds are off the table.) What would that kind of radical austerity do to the economy? Michalis Nikiforos uses the Levy Institute’s macroeconomic model to estimate the effects of beginning rapid fiscal consolidation in the last quarter of this year and maintaining a balanced budget through the rest of the 2014 fiscal year (which is to say, through 2014Q3). The result? A big swing in the expected growth rate, leading to a deep recession: Nikiforos stresses that if… Read More

From Mariana Mazzucato’s “Rethinking the State” video series: Pavlina Tcherneva discusses the implications of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007 for employment outcomes and fiscal policy. She argues that the current view of Keynesian fiscal policies is based on a misreading of Keynes. Simply boosting demand — through what should be understood as trickle-down fiscal policy — is not sufficient to promote inclusive growth. Keynes originally called for a more targeted approach, including “on the spot employment,” as the means to achieve full employment and equitable and sustainable growth. [See also her recent working paper on this theme.] [iframe src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/3f7RGoYdkvo?feature=player_detailpage” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen width=”480″ height=”270″]   L. Randall Wray argues that rethinking the State requires rethinking the relationship between the State and its currency. His analysis starts with the observation that money is based on State power (“currency sovereignty”): it is an “IOU” from the State — a liability — implying that fiscal constraints are in fact artificially created. In this sense, the State cannot run out of money, as it creates and enforces its own IOUs. Governments could — and should — afford to invest more in innovation and technology development to promote the capital development of the economy. [iframe src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/uFDxJuzaDq4?feature=player_detailpage” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen width=”480″ height=”270″] @michlstephens

Here’s a piece I published in HuffPost back on Oct 18, 2010. A flash from the past – three years ago – predicting that QE2 would prove to be as impotent as QE1 had been. And here we are, folks. No recovery in sight–at least once you get off Wall Street. We’re now set–yet again – to go off the fiscal cliff. Some have begun to talk again of the Trillion Dollar Coin – an idea President Obama has again rejected. He fears it would get tied up in the courts. So what? That would take years to settle. Or perhaps he doesn’t want to break the logjam. Politically, he’s winning while the Republicans self-destruct. However, here’s a better idea. We’ve got museums and national parks shut down. Why not sell them to the Fed? We can find a few trillion dollars of Federal Government assets to sell – and the Treasury can pay down enough debt to postpone hitting the debt limit for years. Heck, if we run out of Parks and Recreation facilities to sell, why not have the Fed start buying up National Defense? How much are our nukes worth? That should provide enough spending room to keep the Deficit Hawk Republicans and Democrats happy for a decade or two. Have you ever been inside one of… Read More

The policies Greece has been implementing as part of the price for its two bailouts are not working the way we were told they would. That’s pretty clear if you look at the troika’s endlessly downgraded projections for key economic indicators. Here, for instance, is actual Greek unemployment, compared to a series of troika projections (source): One common response to these apparent failures is to say that we just need to hold on, keep the faith, and perhaps double down on the strategy; eventually, internal devaluation and austerity will bear fruit. It is unfortunate, though not surprising, that this has become the “responsible” position; the stance of the supposed steadfast realist. Presumably it appeals to some deep-seated moral intuitions about the need to pay for past “excesses” or to suffer short-term pain for long-term gain, or some such pablum. And in that context, pointing to increases in poverty, falling living standards, and eye-popping levels of unemployment may not have the rhetorical effect we might hope for, at least among those who see themselves as committed to the policy strategy — perhaps it only reinforces their self-image as defenders of “tough choices” standing steely-eyed in the face of populist clamor. There are no signs that the internal devaluation strategy is having anything like the effect on growth we were told it would… Read More