The Community Development Banks (CDBs) should not be seen as a substitute for the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) or for other programs designed to revitalize lower income areas. Rather, they should be seen as a complement for existing programs and for other programs that will be proposed by...

At a time when small businesses are suffering from a credit crunch, quot;nichequot; financial institutions increasingly are filling the void left by more traditional sources of financing, such as commercial banks. In this working paper, authors Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Ronnie J. Phillips, and...

All modern economies have a quot;chartalistquot; or quot;statequot; money, as acknowledged by Friedrich Knapp and J.M. Keynes. In this paper, I examine the quot;historyquot; of money to shed light on its origins. I also examine in detail the views of those who accepted the chartalist, or state,...

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...

This paper uses Hyman P. Minsky's approach to analyze the current international financial crisis that was initiated by problems in the U.S. real estate market. In a 1987 manuscript, Minsky had already recognized the importance of the trend toward securitization of home mortgages. This paper...

This paper provides an analysis of Keynes's original quot;Bancorquot; proposal as well as more recent proposals for fixed exchange rates. We argue that these schemes fail to pay due attention to the importance of capital movements in today's economy, and that they implicitly adopt an...

This paper briefly summarizes the orthodox approach to banking, finance, and money, and then points the way toward an alternative based on socioeconomics. It argues that the alternative approach is better fitted to not only the historical record, but also sheds more light on the nature of money...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. In this paper, we discuss recent developments related to the...

The work of Hyman Minsky represents an important link between Post Keynesians and Institutionalists. This essay begins with a brief summary of Minsky's early work, including his well-known financial instability hypothesis and his policy proposals designed to reform the financial system. It then...

During the last fifteen years the Fed has experimented with a variety of monetary targets, including reserve aggregates (borrowed and nonborrowed); monetary aggregates as measured by M1, M2, and even M3; prices, as measured by P-Star, price indexes, gold prices, and expected inflation; and a...