With support from the Ford Foundation, the Levy Institute is accepting applications for the 2014 Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar:

Levy Institute
Blithewood
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

June 13–21, 2014

The Levy Institute’s Summer Seminar provides a rigorous discussion of both the theoretical and the applied aspects of Minsky’s economics, with an examination of meaningful prescriptive policies relevant to the current economic and financial crisis. Organized by Jan Kregel, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, and L. Randall Wray, the Seminar program is geared toward graduate students and those at the beginning of their academic or professional careers. The teaching staff includes well-known economists concentrating on and expanding Minsky’s work.

Applications to the Summer Seminar may be made to Susan Howard at the Levy Institute ([email protected]) and should include a current curriculum vitae. Admission to the Seminar includes provision of room and board on the Bard College campus. A limited number of small travel reimbursements of $100 for US fellows and $300 for foreign fellows, respectively, are available to participants.

Due to limited space availability, the deadline for applications is March 1, 2014.

To get a sense of the range of topics and speakers, here is a look at last year’s schedule, which included a closing lecture by Paul McCulley.

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 a full schedule of the speakers and panelists here (audio and select slide presentations will be uploaded during the conference). Some abstracts (pdf) for the presentations have been provided in advance.

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 gave the kind of performance that only Paul can give. Herewith follows my recollection of his points along with my comments on each.

Principle 1: Microeconomics and Macroeconomics are inherently different disciplines. Macro is demand-side; micro is supply-side. For any practical time horizon, demand always drives supply.

For those who have been trained in economics, and then had to suffer through the mainstream preoccupation with the supposed “micro foundations of macro,” or even with the heterodox arguments for “macro foundations of micro,” Paul brilliantly cut to the chase: the twain do not meet in any way that matters. continue reading…

We’ve just returned from Rio de Janeiro, where the Levy Institute held a conference cosponsored by the Multidisciplinary Institute for Development and Strategies (MINDS), supported by the Ford Foundation. The two day conference dealt with global financial governance, financial reregulation, and development challenges in a Minskyan context — a lot of discussion of the regulation of global capital flows, Brazil’s economic prospects, and debate about whether China’s economy represents a development model to be imitated or a ticking time bomb of financial instability; along with the usual focus on banking regulation and reform.

Paul McCulley, former PIMCO director and phrase-coiner (“Minsky moment” and “shadow banking”), delivered the keynote. Speakers and panelists included academics, financial market practitioners, and former and current government officials (Paulo Nogueira Batista, who sits on the Executive Board of the IMF, gave a fascinating inside glimpse at the coalitions and dynamics at the Fund and talked about how delays in implementing reforms designed to give emerging economies more sway in the structures of global financial governance risk creating a crisis of legitimacy).

The full program, including speakers’ powerpoint presentations, is available. Audio clips can be accessed here (video may also be available in the near future).

The next Minsky conference will be held in Athens, November 8-9.

October 2—4, 2013

Announcing two upcoming conferences, 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 financial governance, the structure of financial systems to ensure stability, and the role of government in achieving a growing and equitable economy:

Financial Governance after the Crisis

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
September 26–27, 2013

Among the key topics the conference will address are: designing a financial structure to promote investment in emerging markets; the challenges to global growth posed by continuing austerity measures; the impact of the credit crunch on economic and financial markets; and the larger effects of tight fiscal policy as it relates to the United States, the eurozone, and the BRIC countries.

(see here for list of participants)

The Eurozone Crisis, Greece, and the Experience of Austerity

Athens, Greece
November 8–9, 2013

Topics to be addressed include: 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.

(see here for list of participants)

The Economic Crisis of 2008 and the Added Worker Effect in Transition Countries
Tamar Khitarishvili

Modeling the Housing Market in OECD Countries
Philip Arestis and Ana Rosa González

The Problem of Excess Reserves, Then and Now
Walker F. Todd

On the Franco-German Euro Contradiction and Ultimate Euro Battleground
Jörg Bibow

Currency Concerns under Uncertainty
Sunanda Sen

Indirect Domestic Value Added in Mexico’s Manufacturing Exports, by Origin and Destination Sector
Gerardo Fujii-Gambero and Rosario Cervantes-Martínez

Wages, Exchange Rates, and the Great Inflation Moderation
Nathan Perry and Nathaniel Cline

How the Fed Reanimated Wall Street
Nicola Matthews

Expanding Social Protection in Developing Countries
Rania Antonopoulos

The 22nd Hyman P. Minsky conference, “Building a Financial Structure for a More Stable and Equitable Economy,” is underway.  Today featured speeches by James Bullard of the St. Louis Fed, Eric Rosengren of the Boston Fed, and Thomas Hoenig of the FDIC.

This year’s event combines the Minsky conference’s usual focus on financial stability and financial reform with another of Minsky’s abiding intellectual interests:  full employment policy.  This was reflected in today’s varied panel sessions on measuring inequality, Minskyan employment policies, and the current state of financial regulation.

Follow the second and third days of the conference, livestreamed here. Tomorrow will feature Narayana Kocherlakota, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Alan Blinder, James Galbraith, Jan Kregel, and L. Randall Wray, among many others.

Audio of all sessions and speakers is posted here; media coverage can be found here in the press room.

Hyman Minsky is probably best known for his work on financial instability and financial reform, but he also wrote extensively about how to address the persistent problem of all those left behind by our increasingly financialized economy; about how to design policies that would put an end to income poverty in the midst of plenty. Despite the fact that far more attention has been paid to his writing on financial fragility, these were intimately related issues in Minsky’s research, connecting the financial and “real” economies.

As with his work on finance, Minsky’s approach to poverty did not fit comfortably within the confines of the status quo. With “trickle-down” on one side, pure tax-and-transfer approaches on the other, and vague calls for retraining floating somewhere in the middle, Minsky found the conventional menu of policy options incomplete and inadequate (a menu that has changed very little over the last several decades). Calling for “upgrading” workers without ensuring there are enough jobs to go around is, as Minsky put it, “analogous to the great error-producing sin of infielders — throwing the ball before you have it.” What’s missing, he thought, is a commitment to ensuring that paying jobs are available to all who are ready and able to work; a commitment to “tight full employment.” The question is how to get there without sparking runaway inflation or inducing financial crises. Private markets, left to their own devices, aren’t going to get us there. For part of the answer, Minsky turned to a forgotten side of the New Deal:  direct job creation.

In the interests of providing a more complete picture of Minsky’s intellectual legacy, the Levy Institute has published a collection of his central writings on poverty and full employment: Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not Welfare. The chapters span roughly three decades of Minsky’s writing and feature four never-before-published pieces. The earliest were written in the context of the “War on Poverty” of the Kennedy and Johnson years, but readers will find more than mere historical interest here. Minsky’s critiques of both the “neoclassical synthesis” and the welfare state hold up rather well. If anything, the material is even more relevant today, given our widening income inequality and chronic rates of long-term unemployment — and the fact that the battle against poverty, while not won, has largely been forgotten.

The paperback is now available on Amazon; the Kindle version will be appearing shortly.

William H. Janeway
Institute for New Economic Thinking and Warburg Pincus Technology

Monday, March 4, 2013  4:45 p.m.
Bard College
Reem-Kayden Center for Science and Computation (RKC), Room 103

Excerpt from Doing Capitalism:

“The Innovation Economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error and error and error: upstream exercises in research and invention, and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Each of these activities necessarily generates much waste along the way: dead-end research programs, useless inventions and failed commercial ventures. In between, the innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy, from canals to the internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment. And so at each stage the Innovation Economy depends on sources of funding that are decoupled from concern for economic return.”

About the Author: continue reading…