| الوصف: |
In the last decades of the past century, the transactions executed by the financial system-and, above all, the incomes distributed by it-grew faster than the real economy. In the leading industrialized country, households, the government, and the economy as a whole accumulated unprecedented levels of indebtedness. With the tidal wave of liberalization, financial techniques and innovations became increasingly unscrupulous and opaque. At the beginning of the new century, financial fragility reached dangerous levels: the symptoms of a ‘disaster foretold’ were before everybody’s eyes. This situation, however, clashed with the dogmas of dominant economic theory: the free market was intrinsically stable and financial markets were perfectly efficient. Consequently, there was no reason to worry. We had even entered the Great Moderation, a new era in which the trade cycle and inflation had been definitively bridled. While admitting the key role of imperfections in macroeconomics, Olivier Blanchard (2000) inaugurated the new century by pondering: ‘What do we know about macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell did not?’ With hindsight, we must have forgotten something even more important than what we have learnt! In the twenty-first century, the world economy has been swept by one of the biggest financial crises within human memory, a crisis that has had devastating effects on the real economy. Opposing dominant theory throughout his life, Hyman P. Minsky (1974, 267) repeatedly warned that ‘the capitalist market mechanism is flawed, in the sense that it does not lead to a stable-price-full-employment equilibrium’ and that ‘the basis of the flaw resides in the financial system’. In his view, the economy follows a cyclical path that involves recurrent financial crises. The historical evidence, he argued, confirms that financial crises are systemic and not idiosyncratic (Minsky 1991), and he thus posed the question: ‘Can “it” happen again?’ (Minsky 1982a). ‘It’ was the Great Depression and Minsky’s answer was affirmative. In the twentieth century, post-war big government prevented the worst: ‘the most significant economic event of the era since World War II is something that has not happened: there has not been a deep and long-lasting depression’ (Minsky 1982a, xi). If this is true, however, the return to laissez-faire actively promoted by the mainstream of the profession in recent decades represents ‘a prescription for economic disaster’ (Minsky and Whalen 1996-7, 161). That disaster is now before our eyes. |