John Maynard Keynes

Front Cover
McGraw Hill Professional, May 1, 2008 - Business & Economics - 181 pages

“Today, Mr. Minsky's view [of economics] is more relevant than ever.”- The New York Times

“Indeed, the Minsky moment has become a fashionable catch phrase on Wall Street.”-The Wall Street Journal

John Maynard Keynes offers a timely reconsideration of the work of the revered economics icon. Hyman Minsky argues that what most economists consider Keynesian economics is at odds with the major points of Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes and Minsky refuse to ignore pervasive uncertainty. Once uncertainty is given center stage, recurring episodes of financial system crises are all but inescapable. As Robert Barbera notes in a new preface, “Benign economic circumstances...invite increasingly aggressive financial market wagers. Innovation in finance is a signature development in a capitalist economy. Once leveraged wagers are in place, small disappointments can have exaggerated consequences.” Thus for Minsky economic calm on Main Street engenders financial system fragility which, in turn, ensures a perpetuation of boom and bust cycles.

Minsky colleagues Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray write in a new introduction, “We offer this new edition, in the hope that it will contribute to the reformation of economic theory so that it can address the world in which we actually live-the world that was always the topic of Minsky's analysis.”

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

1 The General Theory and Its Interpretation
1
The Standard Interpretation of Keynes
19
3 Fundamental Perspectives
53
4 Capitalist Finance and the Pricing of Capital Assets
67
5 The Theory of Investment
91
6 Financial Institutions Financial Instability and the Pace of Investment
115
7 Some Implications of the Alternative Interpretation
129
8 Social Philosophy and Economic Policy
143
9 Policy Implications of the Alternative Interpretation
159
Bibliography
167
Index
169
Copyright

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Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 154 - But if our central controls succeed in establishing an aggregate volume of output corresponding to full employment as nearly as is practicable, the classical theory comes into its own again from this point onwards.
Page 86 - Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.
Page 146 - ... a contemporary American financier to be a terrific encroachment on individualism, I defend it, on the contrary, both as the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety and as the condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative.
Page 146 - It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive "natural liberty" in their economic activities. There is no "compact" conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire.
Page 147 - The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes
Page 63 - uncertain" knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable.

About the author (2008)

Hyman P. Minsky, Ph.D. was the first to explain how uncertainty, risk, and financial markets drive the economy. He was a distinguished scholar at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard college, and taught at Washington University for 25 years.

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