Download or read book Financial Fragility and Investment in the Capitalist Economy written by Riccardo Bellofiore and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hyman Minsky is renowned for his theoretical and empirical investigation of the capitalist economy. In this book, a distinguished group of contributors provides an authoritative account of his contribution to the analysis of capitalism and, more particularly, to the fields of monetary and post Keynesian economics. The authors first provide an introduction to Hyman Minsky's economic legacy before going on to discuss his role in analysing the macroeconomy, monetary policy and instability. In detail, they consider the structural instability of a sophisticated market economy, the NAIRU, Minsky's financial fragility hypothesis, his business cycle theory, his investment theory and debt inflation.

Download or read book The Death of Capital written by Michael E. Lewitt and published by John Wiley and Sons. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Death of Capital, respected portfolio manager and longtime investment professional Michael Lewitt looks at how the U.S. economy has increasingly been dominated by short-term speculation rather than industrial expansion in recent years. These disastrous trends, described here as financialization, ignore the fact that capital itself is a highly unstable process rather than a fixed object or category. As a result of our failure to understand the true nature of capital, we have developed a financial and regulatory system that does exactly the opposite of what it should be doing—favoring obscurity over transparency and fomenting instability rather than growth. In explaining where we have gone wrong Lewitt pulls few punches in criticizing some of the counterproductive forces that have led to the death of capital—including Wall Street practices such as private equity and derivatives trading—which he views both as economically unproductive and morally misguided. Page by informative page, this timely guide: Addresses "financialization" and its consequences, such as a weaker U.S. dollar, the destruction of American industries, and the loss of American economic and political influence Explores the most important aspects of capital and capitalism through the prism of four of the world’s great economic thinkers Discusses how the legal system aided economic weakening by privileging short-term investment goals Calls for politically controversial reforms such as stricter regulation of hedge funds and private equity firms, banning naked credit default swaps and Structured Investment Vehicles, and principles-based reforms to improve systemic stability Financial reform is needed to make sure capital does not die again. Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, The Death of Capital is not just a play-by-play of the recent financial crisis, but an original and passionate analysis of the trends that led to it and what can be done in a regulatory sense to address the problems.

Download or read book Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy written by Dr, Jack Rasmus and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as contemporary economics failed to predict the 2008-09 crash, and over-estimated the subsequent brief recovery that followed, economists today are again failing to accurately forecast the slowing global economic growth, the growing fragility, and therefore rising instability in the global economy. This book offers a new approach to explaining why mainstream economic analyses have repeatedly failed and why fiscal and monetary policies have been incapable of producing a sustained recovery. Expanding upon the early contributions of Keynes, Minsky and others, it offers an alternative explanation why the global economy is slowing long term and becoming more unstable, why policies to date have largely failed, and why the next crisis may therefore prove even worse than that of 2008- 09. Systemic fragility is rooted in 9 key empirical trends: slowing real investment; a drift toward deflation; money, credit and liquidity explosion; rising levels of global debt; a shift to speculative financial investing; the restructuring of financial markets to reward capital incomes; the restricting of labor markets to lower wage incomes; the failure of Central Bank monetary policies; and the ineffectiveness of fiscal policies. It results from financial, consumer, and government balance sheet fragilities exacerbating each other -- creating a massive centripetal force disaggregating and tearing apart the whole, untameable by either fiscal or monetary means. This book clarifies how the price system in general, and financial asset prices in particular, transform into fundamentally destabilizing forces under conditions of systemic fragility. It explains why the global system has in recent decades become dependent upon, and even addicted to, massive liquidity injections, and how fiscal policies have been counterproductive, exacerbating fragility and instability. Policymakers’ failure to come to grips with how fundamental changes in the structure of the 21st century global capitalist economy—in particular in financial and labor market structures—make the global economy more systemically fragile can only propel it toward deeper instability and crises.

Download or read book Stagnation and the Financial Explosion written by Harry Magdoff and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the fourth in a continuing series of collected essays by the former editors of Monthly Review on the state of the U.S. economy and its relation to the global system. Like its predecessors, this volume focuses on the most recent phase of the development of U.S. capitalism, stressing the profound contradictions of the underlying processes of capital accumulation and pointing the way to the fundamental reforms that are the essential precondition for a real economic revival.

Download or read book Capitalizing on Crisis written by Greta R. Krippner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of the recent financial crisis, the extent to which the U.S. economy has become dependent on financial activities has been made abundantly clear. In Capitalizing on Crisis, Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation. Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state’s attempts to solve other problems. The book focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, encouragement of foreign capital into the U.S. economy in the context of large fiscal imbalances in the early 1980s, and changes in monetary policy following the shift to high interest rates in 1979. Exhaustively researched, the book brings extensive new empirical evidence to bear on debates regarding recent developments in financial markets and the broader turn to the market that has characterized U.S. society over the last several decades.

Download or read book Macroeconomics Meets Hyman P Minsky written by L. Randall Wray and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper we present a theory of the financing of investment in a modern capitalist economy, following the approach developed by Hyman P. Minsky. We argue that the current financial crisis that began with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the United States in 2007 provides a compelling reason to show how his approach offers us a grounding in the workings of financial capitalism. Even if the spreading global financial crisis is successfully contained this time around, it is likely that analyses will incorporate a substantial dose of Minsky's ideas for many years to come. What we present is an alternative to the standard approach that was developed beginning in the early 1970s, based on the efficient markets hypothesis that relegates money and finance to the sidelines. Minsky vehemently denied the relevance of such a theory, at least for a modern capitalist economy with complex, expensive, and long-lived capital assets. In our kind of economy, the method used to finance positions in assets is of critical importance, both for theory and for real-world outcomes. In the first section we present the investment theory of the business cycle developed by John Maynard Keynes, and then examine Minsky's extension that added a financial theory of investment. This allowed Minsky to analyze the evolution, over time, of the modern capitalist economy toward fragility - what is well known as Minsky's financial instability hypothesis. In the subsequent section, we update Minsky's approach to finance with a more detailed examination of asset pricing and of the evolution of the banking sector. In the final section we briefly review the insights that such an approach can provide for analysis of the current global financial crisis.

Download or read book The Endless Crisis written by John Bellamy Foster and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The days of boom and bubble are over, and the time has come to understand the long-term economic reality. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, hopes for a new phase of rapid economic expansion were quickly dashed. Instead, growth has been slow, unemployment has remained high, wages and benefits have seen little improvement, poverty has increased, and the trend toward more inequality of incomes and wealth has continued. It appears that the Great Recession has given way to a period of long-term anemic growth, which Foster and McChesney aptly term the Great Stagnation. This incisive and timely book traces the origins of economic stagnation and explains what it means for a clear understanding of our current situation. The authors point out that increasing monopolization of the economy—when a handful of large firms dominate one or several industries—leads to an over-abundance of capital and too few profitable investment opportunities, with economic stagnation as the result. Absent powerful stimuli to investment, such as historic innovations like the automobile or major government spending, modern capitalist economies have become increasingly dependent on the financial sector to realize profits. And while financialization may have provided a temporary respite from stagnation, it is a solution that cannot last indefinitely, as instability in financial markets over the last half-decade has made clear.

Download or read book Financial Conditions and Macroeconomic Performance written by Steven M. Fazzari and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers on financial instability and its impact on macroeconomic performance honours Hyman P. Minsky and his lifelong work. It is based on a conference at Washington University, St. Louis, in 1990 and includes among the authors Benjamin M. Friedman, Charles P. Kindleberger, Jan Kregel and Steven Fazzari. These papers consider Minsky's definitive analysis that yields such a clear and disturbing sequence of financial events: booms, government intervention to prevent debt contraction and new booms that cause a progressive buildup of new debt, eventually leaving the economy much more fragile financially.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Money Manager Capitalism written by Eric Tymoigne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book studies the trends that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, as well as the unfolding of the crisis, in order to provide policy recommendations to improve financial stability. The book starts with changes in monetary policy and income distribution from the 1970s. These changes profoundly modified the foundations of economic growth in the US by destroying the commitment banking model and by decreasing the earning power of households whose consumption has been at the core of the growth process. The main themes of the book are the changes in the financial structure and income distribution, the collapse of the Ponzi process in 2007, and actual and prospective policy responses. The objective is to show that Minsky’s approach can be used to understand the making and unfolding of the crisis and to draw some policy implications to improve financial stability.

Download or read book A Failure of Capitalism written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 is the most alarming of our lifetime because of the warp-speed at which it is occurring. How could it have happened, especially after all that we’ve learned from the Great Depression? Why wasn’t it anticipated so that remedial steps could be taken to avoid or mitigate it? What can be done to reverse a slide into a full-blown depression? Why have the responses to date of the government and the economics profession been so lackluster? Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it. No previous acquaintance on the part of the reader with macroeconomics or the theory of finance is presupposed. This is a book for intelligent generalists that will interest specialists as well. Among the facts and causes Posner identifies are: excess savings flowing in from Asia and the reckless lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board; the relation between executive compensation, short-term profit goals, and risky lending; the housing bubble fuelled by low interest rates, aggressive mortgage marketing, and loose regulations; the low savings rate of American people; and the highly leveraged balance sheets of large financial institutions. Posner analyzes the two basic remedial approaches to the crisis, which correspond to the two theories of the cause of the Great Depression: the monetarist—that the Federal Reserve Board allowed the money supply to shrink, thus failing to prevent a disastrous deflation—and the Keynesian—that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920s, a stock-market crash, and the ensuing downward spiral in economic activity. Posner concludes that the pendulum swung too far and that our financial markets need to be more heavily regulated.

Download or read book Wall Street at War written by Alexandra Ouroussoff and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the problems that lie at the heart of the current financial crisis stem from a significant but little-known development that occurred in the early 1980s: investors changed their investment criteria. This change gave rise to a conflict - a silent war - between executives in charge of the world's largest corporations, on the one hand, and credit agencies whose task it is to enforce the criteria on investors' behalf, on the other. The credit agencies that flourished in New York, London and elsewhere acquired a great deal of power because their ratings now reflected investors new priorities, and so controlled the ability of corporations to gain access to capital. The rise of the credit agencies thereby also represented a new model of capitalism, quite different from the old model of the risk-taking entrepreneur. To attract investment capital, corporations now have to employ enormous resources to create the illusion that capital is directed in line with the new expectations imposed by the credit agencies. The result is that devious reporting on companies' activities has become endemic. Drawing on more than six years of fieldwork carried out in some of the world's most powerful corporations and credit rating agencies on Wall Street, this short book describes, for the first time, the unspoken conflict that shapes the global economy. Anthropologist Alexandra Ouroussoff describes with startling clarity the effects of Wall Street's silent war: from the financial community's inability to price risk accurately (now recognised as a major cause of the financial crisis) to the deep reasons behind credit analysts' misplaced faith in numbers. Yet the book's most important contribution is its path-breaking analysis of the conditions of the conflict itself, here revealed as an unintended consequence of a much deeper transformation in the conditions underlying capitalism's success.

Download or read book Heterodox Analysis of Financial Crisis and Reform written by JoŠlle Julie Leclaire and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The editors of this book have put together a compelling compendium of explanations and consequences of the global financial crisis. The essays are fairly homogeneous despite their apparent diversity, all providing a useful historical background. There is an obvious Institutionalist twist, with authors examining the changes in organizations and regulations that have accompanied the move towards financialization and money-manager capitalism. This analysis is often informed by the work of Hyman Minsky, pointing towards the inherent destabilizing forces of competition, as well as the dangers of deregulation, self-regulation, securitization, excess leverage, global imbalances, and the illusion of liquidity-enhancing and risk-reducing financial innovations. Marc Lavoie, University of Ottawa, Canada This valuable collection offers a stimulating range of heterodox views on the global financial crisis and proposals for reform of the financial system, nationally and internationally. The perspective of the authors is broadly Post Keynesian, sometimes with a radical or an institutionalist twist. Vigorously argued, clearly presented and largely non-technical, these essays provide a great deal of food for thought. John King, La Trobe University, Australia Though the worst of the financial crisis of 2008 has, with hope, ebbed, it has forever changed the economy in the United States and throughout the rest of the world. Using the financial and economic crisis as a catalyst, this volume examines how to better regulate the financial system and what to expect in the future if no steps are made toward reform. This book lays the foundation for those steps by providing concrete ideas that will push policy in the direction of jobs growth and widespread prosperity. Paired with a history of financial market problems, Heterodox Analysis of Financial Crisis and Reform analyzes complacency regarding the state of the economy, its lack of jobs, growing income disparity, poverty and the consequences of the false but widely shared belief that the economy is self-regulating. This book suggests ways to account for the inherent instability of financial markets and how to make asset values less precarious. Examining both the macro and micro sides of financial instability, the authors argue that existing rules and regulations are either not applied or that they are not effective enough to prevent market fluctuations of the magnitude experienced in 2008. This volume also sheds new light on just how inextricably linked success on Wall Street and welfare on Main Street have become. Students and scholars of heterodox economics, historians, political scientists, policymakers and all those with an interest in an economic renaissance will find this thought-provoking analysis of significant interest.

Download or read book The Cost of Capitalism Understanding Market Mayhem and Stabilizing our Economic Future written by Robert Barbera and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2009-09-12 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CNBC regular Robert J. Barbera offers a crystal clear explanation of the financial market crisis of 2008 While mainstream financial analysts are stringing together ad hoc explanations for the financial crisis of 2008, a relatively small group of economists saw this coming. In The Cost of Capitalism, Robert J. Barbera explains why. Barbera makes the case that investors and policy-makers can reduce the risk of truly gruesome outcomes if they better plan for the violent economic storms, which history confirms are always over the horizon. Investors will learn how to gird themselves for the roller-coaster ride that is free market capitalism; policy makers will find out how to plan for crises they know will occur at some point; and academic economists will rethink their pursuit of ever more elaborate mathematical models that bear no resemblance to the real world. The message is simple: Stop pretending that people are always rational and that markets are always efficient—and be prepared for market mayhem.

Download or read book Capitalism written by Geoffrey Ingham and published by Polity. This book was released on 2008 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a basic introduction to the 'nuts and bolts' of capitalism for the beginner. Capitalism is a concise, masterly and up-to-date account of the world's most powerful economic system that is accessible to students and general readers.

Download or read book Capitalism With Derivatives written by D. Bryan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-12-16 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the links between things as diverse as the prices of pork bellies, interest rates, and corporate stock? They are all being translated into risk and priced through the system of derivative markets. Financial derivatives are now the largest form of financial transaction in the world, and they are transforming in pervasive ways the lived experience of capitalist economies. Financial derivatives are anchoring the global financial system and challenging the conventional understanding of ownership, money and capital. These challenges are examined in this book, providing a significant reinterpretation of contemporary capitalism that will be of interest to both social scientists and conventional finance scholars.

Download or read book Evolutionary Financial Macroeconomics written by Giorgos Argitis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thorstein Veblen and Hyman Minsky are seminal thinkers who place great importance on the interaction between processes that link finance and financial markets with economic and social evolution. This book makes a contribution to the recontextualisation of the habitual, non-evolutionary and laissez-faire macroeconomic theory and policy, thus exposing the relevant contribution of the macro-theories of Veblen and Minsky. The book starts with an elucidation of Veblen’s cultural theory of insufficient private demand, waste and financial fragility and instability. It shows how speculative and parasitic leverage engenders solvency illusions and risk, pecuniary efficiency, low quality liability structures and socially destructive boom-bust cycles. Minsky’s creative destruction liquidity processes and coordination failures of cash flow escalate the aforementioned path-dependent developments and explosive dynamics of capitalist economies. The main themes of the book are the cultural, evolutionary and holistic vision of macroeconomics, the evolving habits of mind, routines and financial institutions, the speculative, manipulated and unstable financial markets, as well as the financial macroeconomic destabilizing effects of pecuniary and parasitic consumption and investment. This book will be of great interest to researchers, intellectuals and students pursuing economics and finance.

Download or read book Coping with Financial Fragility and Systemic Risk written by Harald A. Benink and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coping with Financial Fragility and Systemic Risk identifies and discusses the sources of perceived fragility in financial institutions and markets and its potential consequences throughout the economy. It then examines private sector solutions for dealing with systemic risk and mitigating the consequences. Finally, the book examines regulatory solutions to these problems.