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,...

The extension of the subprime mortgage crisis to a global financial meltdown led to calls for fundamental reregulation of the United States financial system. However, that reregulation has been slow in implementation and the proposals under discussion are far from fundamental. One explanation...

U.S. financial regulation has traditionally made functional and institutional regulation roughly equivalent. However, the gradual shift away from Glass-Steagall and the introduction of the Financial Modernization Act (FMA) generated a disorderly mix of functions and products across institutions,...

In this brief, Senior Scholar Jan Kregel reviews Hyman P. Minsky's concept of financial fragility - in short, that the structure of a capitalist economy becomes more fragile over a period of prosperity - and concludes that the current crisis is in fact the result of insufficient margins of...

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...

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...

Most economists expected that the “Great Recession” produced by the financial meltdown of 2008 would usher in a resurgence of traditional Keynesian economics and a decline of what has come to be called “market fundamentalism." By contrast, also due to the inadequate size of the 2009...