Recently, some have wondered whether a fiscal stimulus plan could reduce the government's budget deficit. Many also worry that fiscal austerity plans will only bring higher deficits. Issues of this kind involve endogenous changes in tax revenues that occur when output, real wages, and other...

Financial market crises with the threat of a subsequent debt-deflation depression have occurred with increasing regularity in the United States from 1980 through the present. Almost reflexively, when confronted with such circumstances, US institutions and the policymakers that run them have...

This paper examines the emerging challenges to the art of monetary policymaking using the case study of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in light of developments in the Indian economy during the last decade (2003-04 to 2013-14). The paper uses Hyman P. Minsky's financial instability hypothesis as...

Different frameworks of analysis lead to different conceptions of financial instability and financial fragility. On one side, the static approach conceptualizes financial instability as an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism that results from unpredictable random forces that no one can do...

This would seem an opportune moment to reshape banking systems in the Americas. But any effort to rethink and improve banking must acknowledge three major barriers. The first is a crisis of vision: there has been too little consideration of what kind of banking system would work best for...

This paper contrasts the orthodox approach with an alternative view on finance, saving, deficits, and liquidity. The conventional view on the cause of the current global financial crisis points first to excessive United States trade deficits that are supposed to have "soaked up" global savings....

The Federal Reserve has been criticized for not preventing the risky behavior of large financial companies prior to the financial crisis of 2008-09, for approving mergers that aggravated the "too big to fail" problem, and for its substantial contribution to bailouts when their risk management...

Market economies and command economies have long been differentiated by the presence of alternative choice in the form of diversity. Yet most mainstream economic theory is premised on the existence of uniformity. This paper develops the implications of this contradiction for the theory of...

The world's worst economic crisis since the 1930s is now well into its third year. All sorts of explanations have been proffered for the causes of the crisis, from lax regulation and oversight to excessive global liquidity. Unfortunately, these narratives do not take into account the systemic...