> [Minsky's "Financial Instability Hypothesis" is at <http://
> www.levy.org/pubs/wp74.pdf>. His son works at KPFK in LA. The article
> doesn't mention that Minsky's parents met at a dance in honor of Karl
> Marx's birthday. While all the Wall Street bozos are bragging about
> having written about Minsky in 1998, I wrote about him in 1991!
> There's a lot on Minsky in Wall Street <http://
> www.wallstreetthebook.com>.]
You can see lots of Marx in Minsky, although to my knowledge he never references him direct: in 'Stabilising an Unstable Economy' the influence is via Kalecki, Dudley Dillard, etc, people who bridged the gap between Marx and Keynes. Steve Keen (an Australian economist who's very in to Minsky) tells me Minsky knew his Marx well but deliberately censored him from his work because of the anticommunism of the 1950s when Minsky's career was getting underway.
As I've argued before I think this popular version of Minsky is one-sided. For Minsky the point was not that financial crisis was inevitable, but that advanced capitalist governments had developed mechanisms to counteract them. What was interesting to Minsky was the implications of that, not so much the crises themselves. Everyone knows his article 'Can "It" Happen Again?', but fewer are aware that his answer was 'Probably not'.
In the last few weeks, the real Minsky moment was the Fed intervention as much as the crisis. The upshot is that the central banks of the world validate the practice of securitization, as they did earlier with such innovations (now taken entirely for granted) as interbank lending of federal funds and bank liability management with certificates of deposit. If the worst is over, a Minskyan hypothesis is that securitization will continue to grow, and central banks of the world will find more slippage between the interest rates they control and mortgage rates.
Cheers, Mike Beggs scandalum.wordpress.com
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