Galbraith in Brazil

Via Matías Vernengo, here is the audio of James Galbraith’s keynote address at the ANPEC (Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia) conference in Brazil.  Galbraith addresses the global financial crisis and the intellectual reactions (or non-reactions) to it, dealing both with those who attempted to explain away the crisis and those with a “rage to return” who scrambled for past insights.  Here Galbraith has in mind what he regards as the superficial return to Keynes in the early portion of the Great Recession:  “Half-remembered insights were framed into half-measures advocated by Keynesians of convenience. … [T]he authority that continues to be associated with Keynes was invoked to deflect and bury his spirit.”

Galbraith also talks about the Marxian, Godleyan, Minskyan, and “Galbraithian” (John Kenneth) schools of thought (which he likens to “Millenarian sects”), joined by their acceptance of the possibility and likelihood of crises, and runs through the differences in their approaches to thinking about financial crises.