Oblivious to any lessons that might have been learned from the global financial mess it has created, Wall Street is looking for the next asset bubble. Perhaps in the market for death it has found a replacement for the collapsed markets in subprime mortgage–backed securities and credit default...

As the nation watches the impact of the recent stimulus bill on job creation and economic growth, a group of academics continues to dispute the notion that the fiscal and job creation programs of the New Deal helped end the Depression. The work of these revisionist scholars has led to a public...

While serving as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan advocated unsupervised securitization, subprime lending, option ARMs, credit-default swaps, and all manner of financial alchemy in the belief that markets "work" to reduce and spread risk, and to allocate it to those best...

What in monetarism, and what in the "new monetary consensus," led to a correct or even remotely relevant anticipation of the extraordinary financial crisis that broke over the housing sector, the banking system, and the world economy in August 2007 and that has continued to preoccupy central...

The impaired risk assessment caused by the collapse of mortgage-backed securities is the major problem threatening the stability of the American financial system, yet it is not clear that removing these assets from institutional balance sheets, as the government has proposed, will make it easier...

As the House Committee on Financial Services meets to hear the expert testimony of witnesses concerning the regulation of the financial system, the measures that have been introduced to support the system are laying the groundwork for a new domestic financial architecture. Hyman Minsky suggests...

"At the annual banking structure and competition conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in May 1987, the buzzword heard in the corridors and used by many of the speakers was 'that which can be securitized, will be securitized.'" So notes Hyman Minsky in a prescient memo on the nature,...

As homeowner equity continues to disappear, there is a growing consensus that losses on all mortgages will exceed $1 trillion, with financial losses spreading far beyond real estate. Mortgage rates are spiking and, more generally, interest rate spreads remain wide, as financial players shun...

Anyone who reads a newspaper knows that most Americans have accumulated excessive levels of debt, and realizes that as interest rates climb, it becomes more difficult to service financial liabilities. To add insult to injury, wage growth has been slow, while prices--especially for energy--have...

Today's federal budget deficits are a preoccupation of many American citizens and more than a few political leaders. Is the American government going bankrupt? Does our fiscal condition warrant radical surgery, as some now prescribe? Or, are we in such deep trouble that there is no plausible...