Re: Minsky moments
On Aug 25, 2007, at 11:08 PM, Mike Beggs wrote:
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.
Minsky was friendly with one of the anticommunist goons - Jay
Lovestone maybe? I think he did some work along those lines in Europe
after the war.
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.
Yeah, but there’s the contradiction - that stability is
destabilizing. Bailouts encourage risk-taking. I have to dig “Debt
Deflation in the Modern Institutional Environment” out of storage.
Doug