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…
Jan Kregel opened this year’s Minsky Conference (which just wrapped up yesterday) with a reminder that the broader public challenges we face today are still in many ways an echo of those that faced the nation in 1930s. What follows is an abridged version of those remarks:
This year’s conference takes place in an increasingly charged and divisive economic and political atmosphere. Sharp differences in approach are present within the new administration, within the majority party, and even within the opposition. It is a rather different environment than the one envisaged when planning for the Conference started last September. I had originally proposed as a title “The New Administration meets the New Normal: Economic Policy for Secular Stagnation.” It was an obvious attempt to hedge our bets on the outcome of the election. After the election the first adjustment to the title was “Can the New Mercantilism Displace the New Normal: Economic Policy under the New Administration.” As you can see the final title eventually adopted the elocution proposed at the presidential Inauguration.
My intention was not to elicit recollection of the “America First” committee’s support of isolation from the emerging European conflict in the 1930s. It was rather to recall that the phrase was first used, to my knowledge, by Franklin Roosevelt during his first election campaign.
Herbert Hoover had resolutely refrained from direct government support for the growing masses of the unemployed (although support was more than most give him credit for) for fear of interfering with the operation of the market mechanism in producing recovery from what was presumed to be a temporary cyclical downturn: “Recovery was just around the corner.” When this did not occur as expected the blame was laid on foreign financial and political events eroding confidence.
For Roosevelt, Hoover’s policy implied that “farmers and workers must wait for general recovery until some miracle occurs by which the factory wheels revolve again” but “No one knows the formula for this miracle.” Instead he argued in favor of direct measures to “restore prosperity here in this country by re-establishing the purchasing power of half the people of the country … In this respect, I am for America first.”
Instead of the miracle of a spontaneous market recovery, Roosevelt promised to take action to defend the condition of the “forgotten man” by offering him a “new deal” to protect from the ravages of bankers and industrialists. The simple substitution of “America Great” for “new deal” suggests an important similarity between the rhetoric and the target audience of the two campaigns.
It is instructive that in both cases the election was won with promises, creating a belief that appropriate actions would be forthcoming. We know from history how Roosevelt proceeded by experimentation, by trial and error, of what at the time were considered audacious, radical policies.
The question before us today is how the experimentation of the new administration may be directed to fulfill campaign promises. continue reading…
Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
Blithewood
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504
The 2017 Minsky Conference will address the implications of the new administration’s “America First” policies, focusing on the outlook for trade, taxation, fiscal, and financial regulation measures to generate domestic investments capable of moving the growth rate beyond the “new normal” established in the aftermath of the Great Recession, without jeopardizing financial stability. It will also seek to assess the impact of different financing schemes on both infrastructure investment and the return of central bank monetary policies to more neutral interest rates. Since these new policy proposals will have a global impact, the conference will focus on their implication for the performance of European and Latin American economies.
In a presentation here at the Levy Institute, Emilios Avgouleas argued that financial regulatory changes since the crisis have become so complex they represent a source of financial instability, and that new liquidity and capital requirements have contributed to the problem of “short-termism” in finance.
Avgouleas proposed regulatory simplification and a reorientation that would create greater relative incentives for funding long-term investment projects (e.g., infrastructure), including a lower regulatory and tax burden on long-term instruments. Empowering issuers of long-term instruments like project bonds with intellectual property rights could, he suggested, help control the quality of these financial products by preventing “slicing and dicing” in derivatives markets, on pain of losing prescribed privileges.
You can watch the presentation below: “The Financial Regulation Conundrum: Why We Should Discriminate in Favor of Long-Term Finance”
L. Randall Wray’s recently published book on the work of Hyman Minsky (Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist) was reviewed by Victoria Bateman for Times Higher Education. Here’s a taste:
Having experienced the pain of a new Great Depression, the very least we should expect is that economists try to learn from it. Unfortunately, still too few of them understand the importance of what Minsky had to say …. While Minsky is now quite well known, his contributions are still widely ignored or misunderstood.
In terms of name recognition or casual citation, there’s been a lot of progress made in raising Minsky’s profile. As for comprehension of his vision of economics and public policy (or the influence of that vision on policymaking), there’s a tremendous amount of work ahead. Here’s hoping the book helps us move a little further along that path. Read the entire review here.
The 2016 Minsky conference will be held here at Blithewood mansion, home of the Levy Institute. Barney Frank will be among the keynote speakers:
Will the Global Economic Environment Constrain US Growth and Employment?
Organized by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College with support from the Ford Foundation
Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
Blithewood
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504
April 12–13, 2016
The 2016 Minsky Conference will address whether what appears to be a global economic slowdown will jeopardize the implementation and efficiency of Dodd-Frank regulatory reforms, the transition of monetary policy away from zero interest rates, and the “new” normal of fiscal policy, as well as the use of fiscal policies aimed at achieving sustainable growth and full employment.
Dimitri Papadimitriou and new Levy Institute Research Associate Emilios Avgouleas write about one of the obstacles to recovery of the Greek economy: the absence of credit expansion in connection with still-troubled Greek banks.
Beyond deposit flight and the ongoing recession, Papadimitriou and Avgouleas argue that the botched recapitalization of Greek banks can also be blamed for the failure to alleviate this liquidity crunch. As the next round approaches, they warn that past recapitalization efforts did not follow internationally-tested best practices:
The decision by creditors to allow the old, now minority, shareholders and incumbent management to retain effective control of Greek banks is highly questionable. This rather unusual governance approach in a post-rescue period meant that the Greek banking system did not benefit from any cleanup efforts, especially in light of the interlocking and privileged relationships some bankers enjoy with Greek political, media, and economic interests.
In addition, they stress that effective recapitalization requires some attempt to restructure loan portfolios: an attempt to deal with the significant — and still growing — share of loans falling into the “nonperforming” category (NPLs). This chart showing the growth of NPLs (from a strategic analysis by Papadimitriou, Michalis Nikiforos, and Gennaro Zezza), gives you a sense of the debt-deflation trap in which Greece is stuck:
In order to clear the way for Greek banks to return to making loans, Avgouleas and Papadimitriou propose the creation of a “bad bank” that would take on the NPLs, with government guarantees currently extended to Greek banks withdrawn and applied instead to the bad bank fund.
Under this scheme, Greek borrowers would be offered an effective way to restructure their borderline loans while banks could avoid writing off all NPLs, with significant consequences for their balance sheets, and instead have the loans objectively valued and transferred to the bad bank. In addition, creditors would not have to face an unduly inflated Greek bank rescue bill, and the investment that Greek taxpayers have made and will make in the banking sector would not be entirely wiped out. Sound bank recapitalization with concurrent avoidance of any creditor bail-in—which under the current circumstances would prove catastrophic—and implementation of robust and sensible corporate governance changes could help the Greek banking sector return to financial health.
The complete analysis can be found in their newly released policy note (pdf).
Below is the wide-ranging interview L. Randall Wray gave to EKO – Público TV in Spain as part of the launch of the Spanish edition of his Modern Money Primer (questions in Spanish):
While in Spain for the launch of my Modern Money Primer in Spanish, I gave a long interview for Public Television. Parts of that interview are interspersed in this segment on public banking. My interview is in English (with Spanish subtitles), while the rest is in Spanish. Other portions of my interview will be broadcast later.
The Boom Bust Boom movie on Minsky will be released next month. Watch for it. I do not know how widely it will be distributed, but it is well worth seeing. Here’s a nice piece from The Guardian:
To Move Beyond Boom and Bust, We Need a New Theory of Capitalism
By Paul Mason, The Guardian UK
23 March 15
his is the year that economics might, if we are lucky, turn a corner. There’s a deluge of calls for change in the way it is taught in universities. There’s a global conference at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, where the giants of radical economics – including Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – will get their biggest ever mainstream platform. And there’s a film where a star of Monty Python talks to a puppet of Hyman Minsky.
Terry Jones’s documentary film Boom Bust Boom hits the cinemas this month. Using puppetry and talking heads (including mine), Jones is trying to popularise the work of Minsky, a US economist who died in 1996 but whose name has become for ever associated with the Lehman Brothers crash. Terrified analysts labelled it the “Minsky moment”.
Minsky’s genius was to show that financially complex capitalism is inherently unstable. Under conditions of stability, firms, banks and households will, over time, move from a position where their income pays off their debt, to one where it can only meet the interest payments on it. Finally, as instability rises, and central banks respond by expanding the supply of money, people end up borrowing just to pay back interest. The price of shares, homes and commodities rockets. Bust becomes inevitable.
This logical and coherent prediction was laughed at until it came true. Mainstream economics had convinced itself that capitalism tends towards equilibrium; and that any shocks must be external. It did so by reducing economic thought to the construction of abstract models, which perfectly describe the system 95% of the time, but break down during critical events.
In the aftermath of the crisis – which threatens some countries with a phase of stagnation lasting decades – Minsky’s insight has been acknowledged. But his supporters face a problem. The mainstream has a model; the radicals do not. The mainstream theory is “good enough” to run a business, a finance ministry or a central bank – as long as you are prepared, in practice, to ignore that theory when faced with crises.
his is the year that economics might, if we are lucky, turn a corner. There’s a deluge of calls for change in the way it is taught in universities. There’s a global conference at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, where the giants of radical economics – including Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – will get their biggest ever mainstream platform. And there’s a film where a star of Monty Python talks to a puppet of Hyman Minsky.
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