Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French thinker who did most of his writing in the last six years of his life. One of his major contributions to economic thought was his application of opportunity cost to a wide range of economic policies. The present paper uses the Bastiat approach to...

This paper honors Don Lavoie's work on the relationship between theory and history in Austrian economics by using the current recession as an example of many of the ideas found in his paper on the “Interpretive Dimension of Economics.” More specifically, I start from the premise that all...

After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability.  Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as...

The American system of political economy surely faces a fiscal crisis illustrated by but not limited to a trend of growing deficits and debt that cannot continue. What can’t continue won’t continue. In what fashion change occurs will be governed by forthcoming interactions between power and...

Turner's book presents a new approach to monetary theory and policy. What's novel in Turner's book is not the proposition that debt can be dangerous, but that debt is what modern financial systems naturally create; and always to excess. Debt as an economic evil is an old characterization....

In November 1987, Hyman Minsky visited Bogotá, Colombia, after being invited by a group of professors who at that time were interested in post-Keynesian economics. There, Minsky delivered some lectures, and Lauchlin Currie attended two of those lectures at the National University of Colombia....

This article examines the contribution of Clément Juglar to the theory of periodic crises in the context of the evolution of the doctrine towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Juglar's original contribution (1862) and its evolution to the final form of his doctrine are described in...

Britain's suspension of gold convertibility in September 1931 was one of the most surprising and significant events in the history of the global financial system. Whereas London had traditionally been the center of the international gold standard, in the 1930s Britain led the world into the era...

Although Gerolamo Boccardo did not contribute an original theory of crises in his own Dizionario della economia politica (1857) - he relied, in fact, on the one formulated a few years earlier by Charles Coquelin - he introduced some interesting innovations. In particular, he examined the...

There are striking similarities between the 'Krach' of 1929 and the current euro area debt crisis concerning the adjustment mechanisms involved overcoming international trade imbalances caused then by the German Transfer Problem and war reparations in general and now by intra-euro-area trade...