We are accepting applications for the 2019 Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar, held here at the Levy Institute and the wider Bard College campus June 16–22:

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce the tenth Minsky Summer Seminar will be held from June 16–22, 2019. The Seminar will provide a rigorous discussion of both the theoretical and applied aspects of Minsky’s economics, with an examination of meaningful prescriptive policies relevant to the current economic and financial outlook. It will also provide an introduction to Wynne Godley’s stock-flow consistent modeling methods via hands-on workshops.

The Summer Seminar will be of particular interest to graduate students, recent graduates, and those at the beginning of their academic or professional careers. The teaching staff will include well-known economists working in the theory and policy tradition of Hyman Minsky and Wynne Godley.

Applications may be made to Kathleen Mullaly at the Levy Institute ([email protected]), and should include a letter of application and current curriculum vitae. Admission to the Summer Seminar will include provision of room and board on the Bard College campus. The registration fee for the Seminar will be $350.

Due to limited space availability, the Seminar will be limited to 30 participants; applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting in January 2019.

The 10th anniversary of the September collapse of the US financial system has led to a number of commentaries on the causes of the Lehman bankruptcy and cures for its aftermath. Most tend to focus on identifying the proximate causes of the crisis in an attempt to assess the adequacy of the regulations put in place after the crisis to prevent a repetition. It is interesting that while Hy Minsky’s work became a touchstone of attempts to analyze the crisis as it was occurring, his work is notably absent in the current discussions.

While it is impossible to discern how Minsky might have answered these questions, his work does provide an indication of his likely response. Those familiar with Minsky’s work would recall his emphasis on the endogenous generation of fragility in the financial system, a process building up over time as borrowers and lenders use positive outcomes to increase their confidence in expectations of future success. The result is a slow erosion of the buffers available to cushion disappointment in those overconfident expectations. And disappointed these expectations must be, for, as Minsky argued, the confirmation of expectations of future results depends on decisions that will only be taken in the future. Since these decisions cannot be known with certainty, today’s expectations are extremely unlikely to be fully validated by future events. In a capitalist economy financial commitments are financed by incurring debt, so the disappointment of expectations will produce a failure to validate debt, leading to the inexorable transformation of financial positions from what Minsky called “hedge” to “speculative” to “Ponzi” financing structures. These structures refer to the ability of current cash flows to meet these commitments.

Thus, for Minsky, the crisis that broke out ten years ago would have been considered as the culmination of a process that started much earlier, sometime in the 1980s. An important aspect was the attack on the role of government and support for more restrictive fiscal policies that followed Reagan’s pronouncement “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” producing more procyclical budget policy that removed the “Big Government” floor under incomes during a recession. For Minsky, the sign of the budget was not important, but its role as an automatic stabilizer was crucial to financial stability. At the same time, the rise of monetarist monetary policies meant the “Big Bank” was no longer assured of placing a floor under asset prices by acting as a lender of last resort. By the early 1990s, Minsky had thus reversed his belief that a repetition of the Great Depression was unlikely because of the role of the “Big Government” and the “Big Bank.” Both had been diminished to the extent that they were no longer able to counter the inevitable translation of fragility into instability. By the 1990s, he clearly believed it could happen again. continue reading…

L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at Bard and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, was a visiting professor at the University of Bolzano (Italy) and the University of Bergamo (Italy) in May-June and at the University of Campinas (Brazil) in August. In Campinas, he gave a series of lectures for a course on Modern Money Theory. In Bolzano he gave a talk titled “Secular Stagnation: Is It Inevitable?”

Wray also delivered a series of lectures in Trento for a course on Modern Money Theory and participated on a panel on the Job Guarantee: La rivoluzione dei Piani di Lavoro Garantito. Video of the latter presentations can be viewed here and here.

The Levy Institute is a cosponsor of the Second International Modern Monetary Theory Conference, which will take place September 28–30 at the New School and will feature Institute scholars L. Randall Wray, Pavlina Tcherneva, Stephanie Kelton, and Mathew Forstater:

Like the first conference, this year will feature contributions from fields as diverse as macroeconomics, law, history, public policy, and corporate finance, with the goal of creating a community of scholars working within the MMT paradigm. This year’s theme, “Public Money, Public Purpose, Public Power,” signals the MMT community’s efforts to build bridges between social justice movements, inspire broad-based participation, and more deeply discuss how our ideas may be concretized politically.

The conference runs from Friday, September 28 through Sunday, September 30. Friday will feature roundtable discussions and keynote addresses from MMT luminaries on the origins of MMT, the process of making MMT “mainstream,” and the relationship between MMT and progressive advocacy for the job guarantee. Saturday will feature workshops facilitated by a range of community leaders and experts seeking to develop and deepen connections between MMT and other fields. Sunday begins with two “town hall” meetings, exploring MMT’s capacity as both a domestic and an international movement. The proceedings will conclude with a plenary session on the strategic and institutional goals of the movement going forward.

To learn more about the Second International MMT Conference or to register, visit their website at mmtconference.org or email [email protected].

Learn more about MMT in these Levy Institute publications: continue reading…