This paper contrasts the economic incentives implicit in the Keynes-Minsky approach to inherent financial market instability with the incentives behind the traditional equilibrium approach leading to market stability to provide a framework for analyzing the stability induced by the recent...

This paper traces the evolution of housing finance in the United States from the deregulation of the financial system in the 1970s to the breakdown of the savings and loan industry and the development of GSE (government-sponsored enterprise) securitization and the private financial system. The...

Ragnar Nurkse was one the pioneers in development economics. This paper celebrates the hundredth anniversary of his birth with a critical retrospective of his overall contribution to the field, in particular his views on the importance of employment policy in mobilizing domestic resources and...

While the traditional approach to the adjustment of international imbalances assumes industrialized countries at a similar level of development and with similar production structures, such imbalances have historically been the result of a process of catching up by late-industrializing developing...

Over the last two centuries in Latin America a Washington Consensus development strategy based on integration in the global trading system has dominated both domestic demand management and industrialization "from within." This paper assesses the performance of each from the point of view of the...

The term BRIC was first coined by Goldman Sachs and refers to the fast-growing developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China--a class of middle-income emerging market economies of relatively large size that are capable of self-sustained expansion. Their combined economies could exceed...

The Federal Reserve's response to the current financial crisis has been praised because it introduced a zero interest rate policy more rapidly than the Bank of Japan (during the Japanese crisis of the 1990s) and embraced massive "quantitative easing." However, despite vast capital injections,...

Past experience suggests that multifunctional banking is the leading source of financial crisis, while large bank size contributes to contagion and systemic risk. This indicates that resolving large banks will not solve the problems associated with multifunctional banking--a conclusion reached...

The demand for reform of the financial system has focused on the dollar's loss of international purchasing power (the Triffin dilemma) and its substitution by an international reserve currency that is not a national currency. The problem, however, is not the particular asset that serves as the...

The current crisis in the financial systems of developed countries is often explained in terms of Hyman P. Minsky’s financial fragility hypothesis. Minsky was an economist at the Levy Institute and the foremost expert on credit crunches. His hypothesis was that the structure of a capitalist...