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Hyman Minsky's rebooting of macroeconomic theory

Economist Hyman Minsky is known for his financial instability hypothesis, but his larger project was a complete reconstruction of macroeconomics. Minsky rejected the neoclassical synthesis, basing his ideas on an earlier institutionalist tradition but informed by Keynes's General Theory and influenced by Joseph Schumpeter, Minsky's dissertation supervisor. In The Vision of Hyman Minsky, L. Randall Wray traces the broad evolution of Minsky's rethinking of macroeconomic theory over five decades of academic work, from the 1950s to the mid-1990s.

Wray explains that in Minsky's view, capitalism is a financial system; whether economic development will promote enterprise or speculation depends on the financial structure. He disavowed the mainstream notion that markets seek equilibrium, insisting that the natural instability of capitalism must be constrained by institutional ceilings and floors. Wray shows that these themes run through Minsky's earliest work-including even his undergraduate and graduate studies-as well as his later work envisioning a reconstituted financial structure that would promote the capital development of the economy. The continuing relevance of Minsky's vision became clear during the global financial crisis of 2008, which The New Yorker called "the Minsky Moment." Today, with the growing influence of crypto and private equity in financial markets and the unprecedented levels of debt created to finance artificial intelligence, Minsky's warnings about the instability of what he called "Money Manager Capitalism" are more urgent than ever.