The annual Minsky conference, co-sponsored by the Levy Institute and the Ford Foundation, was held this past week in NYC. The audio transcripts of all the presentations (including one by yours truly) are online here. (I will also add my powerpoint below so you can look at it while listening to the audio.)

My presentation quickly summarized results of a project I am directing that examines democratic governance and accountability of the Federal Reserve, focusing on its response to the global financial crisis. You can read our first report here.

I won’t go into that today. I just wanted to very quickly summarize two quite interesting statements made by others over the course of the conference.

First, Joe Stiglitz had a great analogy about derivatives. Recall that part of the reason for the creation and explosion of derivatives was to spread risk. For example, mortgage-backed securities were supposed to make the global financial system safer by spreading US real estate risks all over the world. He then compared that to, say, a deadly flu virus. Would you want to spread the virus all over the world, or quarantine it? Remember Warren Buffet’s statement that all these new financial products are “weapons of mass destruction”–like the 1914 flu virus. And, indeed, just as Stiglitz said, spreading those deadly weapons all over the world ensured that when problems hit, the whole world financial system was infected.

The other observation was by Frank Partnoy, and also addressed the innovations in the financial sector. continue reading…

(cross posted at EconoMonitor)

Since Paul Krugman kicked-off a heated discussion about Minsky’s views on banks, and because the annual “Minsky Conference” co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Levy Economics Institute occurred this past week, I thought it would be useful to run a couple of posts laying out what Minsky was all about. This first piece will detail his early work on what led up to development of his famous “financial instability hypothesis.”

Minsky’s Early Contributions

In his publications in the 1950s through the mid 1960s, Minsky gradually developed his analysis of the cycles. First, he argued that institutions, and in particular financial institutions, matter. This was a reaction against the growing dominance of a particular version of Keynesian economics best represented in the ISLM model. Although Minsky had studied with Alvin Hansen at Harvard, he preferred the institutional detail of Henry Simons at Chicago. The overly simplistic approach to macroeconomics buried finance behind the LM curve; further, because the ISLM analysis only concerned the unique point of equilibrium, it could say nothing about the dynamics of a real world economy. For these reasons, Minsky was more interested in the multiplier-accelerator model that allowed for the possibility of explosive growth. In some of his earliest work, he added institutional ceilings and floors to produce a variety of possible outcomes, including steady growth, cycles, booms, and long depressions. He ultimately came back to these models in some of his last papers written at the Levy Institute. It is clear, however, that the results of these analyses played a role in his argument that the New Deal and Post War institutional arrangements constrained the inherent instability of modern capitalism, producing the semblance of stability.

At the same time, he examined financial innovation, arguing that normal profit seeking by financial institutions continually subverted attempts by the authorities to constrain money supply growth. This is one of the main reasons why he rejected the LM curve’s presumption of a fixed money supply. Indeed, central bank restraint would induce innovations to ensure that it could never follow a growth rate rule, such as that propagated for decades by Milton Friedman. These innovations would also stretch liquidity in ways that would make the system more vulnerable to disruption. If the central bank intervened as lender of last resort, it would validate the innovation, ensuring it would persist. Minsky’s first important paper in 1957 examined the creation of the fed funds market, showing how it allowed the banking system to economize on reserves in a way that would endogenize the money supply. The first serious test came in 1966 in the muni bond market and the second in 1970 with a run on commercial paper—but each of these was resolved through prompt central bank action. Thus, while the early post-war period was a good example of a “conditionally coherent” financial system, with little private debt and a huge inherited stock of federal debt (from WWII), profit-seeking innovations would gradually render the institutional constraints less binding. Financial crises would become more frequent and more severe, testing the ability of the authorities to prevent “it” from happening again. The apparent stability would promote instability. continue reading…

Debts left over on consumers’ balance sheets from the mortgage crisis have had particularly serious and long-lasting effects on the economic health of those localities where the crisis hit the hardest, according to what appears to be some  interesting and important evidence discussed in an article in today’s New York Times. Of course, the notion that such balance-sheet issues are crucial is a key part of the macroeconomics we work on here, and very much in the tradition of Godley, Minsky, and other heterodox economists.

Last week I explained why Minsky matters, outlining his main contributions. This was, in part, a response to a blog post by Paul Krugman that appeared to dismiss the importance of trying to find out “what Minsky really meant.” But, more importantly, it was a response to his defense of a simple model of debt deflation dynamics that left banks out of the picture. In Krugman’s view, banks are not very important since all they do is to intermediate between savers and investors, taking in deposits and packaging them into loans.

In my post last week I promised to go into more detail on Minsky’s approach to banking. And right on cue, Krugman expanded on his views in this post.

Now, I know that Krugman’s own specialty is not money and banking, so one would not expect him to have a deep understanding of all the technical details.  However, he is an important columnist and textbook writer, so if he is going to expound upon “what banks do,” he should at least have the basics more-or-less correct. But he doesn’t. Indeed, his views are outdated by at least a century, or more. Can one imagine a science writer at the NYTimes presenting Newtonian physics as state-of-the-art?

If there is any banking “mysticism,” it is what Krugman is presenting—not what Minsky’s followers are arguing. Yes, we need Minsky—whose views even from the 1950s are far more relevant to today’s real world banks than are Krugman’s.

I mean no disrespect here. Like the rest of Krugman’s followers, I think he’s one of the best columnists at the NYTimes–and he covers a great range of topics with flair and good insight. But he cannot be trusted when it comes to money—he just doesn’t get it. What he is presenting is a strange combination of early twentieth century theory plus a throwback to a particular nineteenth century view that was based on an even older “goldsmith” story. Let me explain. continue reading…

In his latest policy note, C. J. Polychroniou argues that the political and economic dominance of finance is pushing advanced liberal societies to a breaking point:

The main problem is the power that finance capitalism exerts over domestic society and the abuses that it inflicts. Finance capitalism is economically unproductive (it does not create true wealth), socially parasitic (it lives off the revenues produced by other sectors of the economy), and politically antidemocratic (it restricts the distribution of wealth, creates unparalleled inequality, and fights for exclusive privileges). At the turn of the 20th century, finance capitalism … was still seeking to bring industry under its control and exercised its brutal power largely on undemocratic societies overseas. By the late 1970s, it can safely be said that finance capitalism had subjugated industry at home and took control of government power in the same manner that the great industrialists of the 19th and 20th centuries were able to influence public policy. The difference is that finance capitalism has no vested interest in seeing the living standards of ordinary people improve, and regards any public intervention as an attack on its freedom to exploit society’s economic and financial resources as it sees fit. Industrial capitalism was a progressive stage of economic development relative to agrarian capitalism and feudalism. …. But the dominance of finance capitalism represents a setback for society as a whole.

Read the rest here.

Philip Pilkington and Warren Mosler have teamed up to present a financial innovation that they believe could settle the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis:  a special type of “tax-backed bond” that contains a clause stating that if (and only if) the country issuing the bond defaults, the bond can be used to make tax payments in that country.  “If an investor holds an Irish government bond, for example, worth 1,000 euros,” they write, “and the Irish government misses a payment of interest or principal, the investor can simply use the bond to make tax payments to the Irish government in the amount of 1,000 euros.”

Pilkington and Mosler call attention to the fact that countries like Japan that issue their own currency are not facing unbearably heavy interest costs on their debt; with the reason being that such countries can always make payments when due.  Investors know that Japan can always create enough yen to meet its obligations.  Eurozone member-states, however, are users, not issuers of the euro, and as a result, while many countries in the periphery have debt-to-GDP ratios that are smaller than Japan’s, they nevertheless face higher and higher debt servicing costs.

The idea behind the tax-backed bond, which draws inspiration from Modern Monetary Theory, is to provide a way of securing investor confidence in peripheral debt (the bonds are guaranteed to be “money good,” since they’re acceptable for the payment of taxes in the event of default) and thereby keep interest payments under control, without requiring a eurozone exit; to provide a way of endowing peripheral debt with an aura of safety comparable to that of the debt of a currency-issuing nation—but without requiring a country like Greece to actually leave the euro and revert to the drachma.

And as Pilkington and Mosler argue, if this plan works, the bonds would never actually be used for tax payments:  “since this tax backing would set an absolute floor below which the value of the asset could not fall, and because the bonds pay a fair rate of interest, there would be no risk of actual loss and no reason to part with them—and, hence, the bonds might never be used to repay taxes.”

You can read their proposal here.

My friend Steve Keen recently presented a “primer” on Hyman Minsky; you can read it here.

In his piece, Steve criticized the methodology used by Paul Krugman and argued that Krugman could learn a lot from Minsky. In particular, Krugman’s equilibrium approach and primitive dynamics were contrasted to Minsky’s rich analysis. Finally, Krugman’s model of debt deflation dynamics left out banks—while banks always played an important role in Minsky’s approach. Krugman responded here.

I found two things of interest in this exchange.

First, Krugman argued: “So, first of all, my basic reaction to discussions about What Minsky Really Meant — and, similarly, to discussions about What Keynes Really Meant — is, I Don’t Care.” This is not the first time Krugman has mentioned Minsky—see, for example, here, which previewed a talk he was to give titled “The night they reread Minsky.”

Amazingly, Minsky only appears in the title of the talk. It is pretty clear that Krugman has not cared enough to try to find out what Minsky wrote, much less “what Minsky really meant.” Minsky always argued that he stood “on the shoulders of giants”—and he took the time to find out what they had said. So while Minsky probably would have agreed with Krugman that arguing about what the “master” really meant was less interesting, he did believe it was worthwhile to try to understand the writings of those whose shoulders you stand on.

Second, at the end of his most recent blog it is pretty clear that Krugman leaves banks out of his model because he doesn’t understand “what banks do.” He starts by saying ”If I decide to cut back on my spending and stash the funds in a bank, which lends them out to someone else…” Well, if he had actually read Minsky, he would understand that this is the description of a loan shark, not a bank.

So what I want to do today is to quickly summarize Minsky’s main areas of research. Then next week I will post more on Minsky’s view of “money and banking.” For those who want to read ahead, you can see the more “wonkish” piece at the Levy Institute, where I summarize Minsky’s later (mostly unknown) work on banks.

So, who was this Minsky guy and what was he all about? continue reading…

I’d like to take a moment to give a brief report on some research that my colleagues Ajit Zacharias, Rania Antonopoulous, and I have been working on as a result of collaboration between the Levy Economics Institute and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Service Centre for Latin America and the Caribbean (RSCLAC), particularly the Gender Practice, Poverty, and Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Areas. It addresses an identified need to expand our understanding of the links between income poverty and the time allocation of households, and between paid and unpaid work. Policies to combat poverty and promote equality require a deeper and more detailed understanding of the linkages between conditions of employment, unpaid household production, and existing arrangements of social provisioning—including social care provisioning.

Income poverty is customarily judged by the ability of individuals and households to gain access to some level of minimum income based on the premise that such access ensures the fulfilment of basic material needs.  However, this approach neglects to take into account the necessary (unpaid) household production requirements, without which basic needs cannot be fulfilled. Households differ in terms of their household production requirements and also in terms of the time their members have available to meet the requirements, so it should not be assumed that all households can meet these requirements. In order to promote gender equality, it is imperative to understand how labor force participation and earnings interact with household production responsibilities, as it is already well established that women contribute their time disproportionately to unpaid work.

We provide an analytical and empirical framework that includes unpaid household production work in the concept and measurement of poverty. Our approach shows that awareness of gender differences (especially in unpaid work) can bring to the forefront a ‘missing’ but key analytical category that allows for an improved measurement of poverty, and a deeper and more precise poverty classification of households and individuals. Future posts will delve more into policy ramifications of this work. In this post, I want to report on two of the headline results of our research.

Our alternative measure is a two-dimensional measure of income and time poverty, which we refer to as the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP). Time poverty, especially when coupled with income poverty, imposes hardships on the adults who are time-poor as well as their dependents, particularly the children, elderly, and sick. Income poverty alone does not convey enough useful information about their deprivation. Our measure can shed light on this phenomenon. My colleague Ajit Zacharias has published a working paper that lays out the theoretical underpinnings of the measure, and I have a working paper that outlines the methods used to construct the data sets we used to create the measure for Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.

The first important result of our project is that the size of the hidden poor, namely those with incomes above the official threshold but below the LIMTIP poverty line, is considerable in all three countries (Table 1). The LIMTIP income poverty rate for Argentina is 11.1 percent, compared to 6.2 percent for the official poverty line. For Chile, adjusting for time deficits increases the poverty rate to 17.8 percent from 10.9 percent for the official line. And in Mexico, the poverty rate increases to 50 percent from an already-high 41 percent. This implies that the households in hidden poverty in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico comprise, respectively, 5, 7, and 9 percent of all households.

The second important result of taking time deficits into account is that it dramatically alters our understanding of the depth of income poverty. The average LIMTIP income deficit (the time-adjusted poverty line minus household income) for poor households was 1.5 times higher than the official income deficit in Argentina and Chile and 1.3 times higher in Mexico. Thus, official poverty measures grossly understate the unmet income needs of the poor population. From a practical standpoint, this suggests that taking time deficits into account while formulating poverty alleviation programs will significantly shift both the coverage (including the ‘hidden poor’ in the target population) and the benefit levels (including the time-adjusted income deficits where appropriate).

Table 1 Official, LIMTIP, and ‘Hidden’ Poverty Rates and Number of Poor (thousands)

Matthew Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan report on the latest US investment craze:  buying up large bundles of foreclosed homes from Fannie Mae and renting them out to take advantage of the hot rental market.  Randall Wray is among the critics quoted in the article who contend that, as Goldstein and Ablan put it, “the federal government is fostering a transfer of wealth of sorts by selling big pools of foreclosed homes to big fund investors and high-net-worth individuals. There’s also concern that some of the players who helped create the housing crisis will now benefit by buying foreclosed homes at a steep discount.”

Wall Street benefited from the ballooning indebtedness of American households on the way up, and now on the way down they’re taking advantage of the flipside of that indebtedness, as families’ assets are seized, transferred, and rented out … likely to some of the same people who just lost their homes.  That feedback loop is galling enough.  But as Wray has pointed out, it’s also a cycle that’s been greased by foreclosure fraud.

Felix Salmon is surprised at the continued success of the financial industry in pushing legislation (in this case, he’s talking about the proposed “JOBS Act,” a key provision of which involves a nice dose of financial deregulation):  “a bill which was essentially drafted by a small group of bankers and financiers has managed to get itself widespread bipartisan support, even as it rolls back decades of investor protections.”

At this point, it’s very difficult to imagine what could possibly change these dynamics.  Clearly, triggering a global economic collapse hasn’t made a dent in the sway the industry holds.  There was a lot of enthusiasm surrounding the Occupy movements, but it’s hard to see it amounting to a countervailing political force (even if it intended to be one, which isn’t clear).  Dodd-Frank, for all its faults (and they are legion:  see this new Levy Institute working paper by Bernard Shull, and Chapter 1 of this analysis) appears to be the only game in town.  If it’s able to shrink the sector a little that may change the political economy—but only at the margins.  And that’s likely the best case scenario.