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1、 16. HYMAN MINSKY AND PONZI FINANCEIn August 2007, shortly after the beginning of the subprime crisis, a story on the front page of The WallStreet Journal said, “The recent market turmoil is rocking investors around the globe. But it is raising the stock of one person: a little-known economist whose
2、 views have suddenly become very popular.” The economist concerned was Hyman Minsky, an avowed Keynesian who taught for many years at Washington University in St. Louis. From the early 1960s until shortly before his death in 1996, Minsky advanced the view that free market capitalism is inherently un
3、stable, and that the primary source of this instability is the irresponsible actions of bankers, traders, and other financial types.Should the government fail to regulate the financial sector effectively, Minsky warned, it would be subject to periodic blowups, some of which could plunge the entire e
4、conomy into lengthy recessions. “At a time when many economists were coming to believe in the efficiency of markets,” the Journals Justin Lahart noted, “Mr. Minsky was considered somewhat of a radical.” Now, however, many Wall Street economists and at least one former governor of the Fed were eagerl
5、y poring over his articles and books, most of which were out of print. “We are in the midst of aMinsky moment, bordering on a Minsky meltdown,” Paul McCulley, a managing director at Pacific Investment Management Company, the worlds biggest manager of bond mutual funds, told Lahart. Minsky was born i
6、n Chicago on September 23, 1919. He came from a left-wing background: his mother was a trade union activist and his father a member of the Socialist Party. (According to family legend, the two met at a party to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Karl Marxs birth.) As with Paul Samuelson, Milton
7、Friedman, and many others of his generation, it wasthe Great Depression that inspired Minskys interest in economics. In high school he joined the youth section of the Socialist Party, and during his second year at the University of Chicago, which he entered in 1937, he attended a series of lectures
8、on the economics of socialism. The lecturer was Oskar Lange, the Polish economist and technocrat who helped to formalize the concept of market efficiency. Minsky had been majoring in mathematics, but he decided to switch to economics, attending classes taught by Lange and Henry Simons, a true Chicag
9、o man whononetheless was critical of several aspects of capitalism. In the summer of 1942, Minsky spent a summer at Harvard working with Wassily Leontief, one of the pioneers of mathematical economics. After three years serving in the U.S. Army, he returned to Harvard to complete his graduate work a
10、nd serve as a teaching assistant to Alvin Hansen, who was the leading American Keynesian of his day. With this admirably catholic education, it was perhaps not surprising that Minsky failed to adhere to the increasingly rigid orthodoxy that took hold ofeconomics during the postwar decades. In some w
11、ays, he was a throwback. He expressed his thoughts in clear English, used equations sparingly, and made little attempt to keep up with intellectual fashion. But what Minsky lacked in modernity, he more than made up for in insight. Although he rarely made explicit reference to concepts such as the pr
12、isoners dilemma, asymmetric information, or disaster myopia, his analysis displayed an acute awareness of the various sources of market failure. A keen student of Keyness Treatise on Probability as well as The General Theory, he hadnever accepted that financial markets aggregated economic data effic
13、iently, or that decisions involving the future could be represented as a process of taking mathematical expectations of known probabilities. “To businessmen, portfolio managers and bankers, uncertainty means that decisions are made in the absence of firm knowledge,” Minsky wrote in 1986. “For both t
14、he doubting scientist and the skeptical businessman, I dont know is often the most appropriate answer to questions relevant to decision- making.” Minsky regarded himself as a“post-Keynesian.” Although Keynes, in The General Theory, succeeded in his central aim of demonstrating how a free market econ
15、omy could get stuck in a slump, he didnt explain how booms and busts developed in the first place. His mainstream followers, such as Alvin Hansen and Paul Samuelson, also largely ignored this problem. Their brand of Keynesianism concerned itself mainly with exploring how monetary and fiscal policy c
16、ould be used to stabilize the economy in the face of exogenous shocks, such as a rise in oil prices or a collapse in exports. The mainstream Keynesianframework treated the financial sector in a cursory manner. It had no place for stock market bubbles, credit crunches, or other Wall Street pathologies. That was the lacuna that Minsky set out to fill. “The Wall Streets of the world are important,” he wrote in his 1986 book, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, copies of which were reported
