The subprime financial crisis—10 years after: Was Hyman Minsky a post-Keynesian economist?

Lecture by Marc Lavoie
London, 11 December 2018; 6.30pm

As the subprime financial crisis erupted in 2008, Wall Street analysts started talking of the Minsky Moment. For a while, Hyman Minsky’s out-of-print 1986 book, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, sold for hundreds of dollars on the internet.

This lecture will outline the main features of Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis; a hypothesis entirely ignored by mainstream economists until then, that became enormously popular in the aftermath of the failure of Lehman’s Brothers. Marc’s lecture will challenge the theoretical framework on some of its weaknesses; and will discuss the controversial issue of whether or not Minsky was, or considered himself to be, part of the a post-Keynesian school of thought.

ABOUT

Marc Lavoie holds a Senior Research Chair from the University Sorbonne Paris Cité and teaches at the University of Paris 13. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of Ottawa, where he taught for 38 years. He received a doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Paris 13 in 2015. He is a Research Fellow at the Macroeconomic Research Institute of the Hans Böckler Foundation in Düsseldorf and a Research Associate at the Broadbent Institute in Toronto. Lavoie has published 10 books and over 200 refereed articles or book chapters, mostly in macroeconomics. He is best known for his book with Wynne Godley, Monetary Economics (2007), which is considered a must-read for users of the stock-flow consistent approach. His latest book, Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations, received the 2017 Myrdal Prize from the European Association of Evolutionary Political Economy. He is a co-editor of two academic journals and is on the editorial board of 10 other journals.