Introducing Levy at 40.
In 2026, the Levy Economics Institute marks the 40th anniversary of its founding. For four decades, the Institute has advanced independent economic research, shaped policy debates, and moved beyond the boundaries of mainstream economic thinking.
In the months ahead—alongside our annual conference—we will share new and archival content reflecting on the ideas, research, and scholars that have shaped the Institute’s work over the past 40 years.
CONTENTS
EVENTS
- Insights from a 25-Year Monetary Policy Experiment | Paul Sheard, Wall Street Journal Best-Selling Author | March 11, 11:30 AM
- Levy Economics Institute Anniversary Conference | May 8, 8:30 AM
FEATURES
From the Minsky Archives to the works of influential thinkers like Wynne Godley, L. Randall Wray, and Pavlina Tcherneva among many others–the Levy Institute is proud to have housed many stalwart pieces of independent economic scholarship over the years.
Here are just three of our early greatest hits.
1. The Minsky Archive is housed at the Levy Institute, and is available to scholars seeking a deeper understanding of the work of the late Hyman Minsky. The collection digitizes more than 500 of Minsky’s original works and is accessed tens of thousands of times a year by scholars around the globe.
You can find Minsky’s “The Financial Instability Hypothesis: A Restatement” here.
2. In Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, Minsky wrote about the inherent instability of financial markets in the late 1950s, and accurately predicted a transformation of the economy that would not become apparent for nearly a generation.
The book’s re-release in 2008 included an introduction from Levy Scholars Papadimitriou and Wray.
3. In 1999, the Institute published Wynne Godley’s “Seven Unsustainable Processes,” a strategic analysis that evaluated the contemporary sustainability of processes in private saving, private borrowing, and asset prices. This piece paved the way for our strategic analysis series, now published biannually by the Levy Macro-Modeling Team.
The Levy advantage has always been understanding the internal workings of financial crises and the endemic instability of our financial systems. Over the years, this deeper understanding has enabled us to identify incipient vulnerabilities from climate and AI, to craft a regulatory approach that moves beyond “preventing the last crisis” to anticipating the forces of the next one.
In 2008, with the support of the Ford Foundation, the Levy Institute endeavored to design regulations compatible across different countries and regimes while preventing regulatory arbitrage and ensuring client protection. In the face of the GFC, our scholars developed cohesive financial architecture and associated regulatory reforms for implementation at both the national and international levels.
As part of the Ford-Levy Project, a policy brief by Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray concluded that policymakers must fundamentally change the structure of our economic system, break the cycle of booms and busts, and reduce the influence of managed money, as well as prevent the next speculative boom in yet another asset class. https://lnkd.in/eEiJ6K5v
Levy-issued working paper, “$29 Trillion” was the first in a series reporting the results of a detailed examination of the raw data pried from the Fed by lawsuit and congressional order results. James Felkerson and Nicola Matthews identify the “alphabet soup” of Fed facilities created to deal with various phases of the global financial crisis in detailing an account of the Fed’s response to the Global Financial Crisis.
In a corresponding one-pager, L. Randall Wray advocates for their research and outlines the methods.
Senior Scholar James K. Galbraith has been with the Institute since 1995. As we celebrate Levy’s 40th Anniversary and welcome him as a speaker at our anniversary conference, we now take a moment to reflect on Galbraith’s contributions to Levy scholarship, distinct impact on federal budget policy, and continuing legacy.
In 1996, Galbraith published his first working paper with the Institute, titled “Unemployment, Inflation, and the Job Structure.” Here, he rejects the analytical construct within which many economists operate—that is, the construct in which, in the extreme, macroeconomic behavior is identical to the behavior reflected in microeconomic demand and supply curves.
Galbraith testified before the House Financial Services Committee in 2009 regarding the functions of the Federal Reserve under the Obama administration’s proposals for financial regulation reform—specifically, the extent to which the newly proposed role of systemic risk regulator might conflict with the Fed’s traditional role as the independent authority on monetary policy.
Galbraith’s policy note “Is the Federal Debt Unsustainable?” was published in 2011, and focused on one critical issue: the actual behavior of the public-debt-to-GDP ratio under differing economic assumptions through time. This work represented only a small slice of the scholar’s legacy of hard-hitting policy recommendations.
Building on that trajectory, Galbraith’s 2023 policy note, “In Defense of Low Interest Rates,” published with the Institute, offers a personal and incisive exploration of Keynes’s theory of interest.
Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray has been with the Levy Institute since 1992. His pivotal scholarship has played a critical role in developing the framework and insights of Modern Money Theory. Here we take a look at a small portion of Wray’s influential portfolio.
Published in 1993, Wray’s “Origins of Money” proposes an alternative approach to the origins of money and banking that emerges from a comparative analysis of economic institutions.
Wray’s “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” set out a map of a Goldilocks economy facing a global financial crisis, global deflation and excess capacity, and a domestic fiscal surplus in conjunction with record private deficits. This model would later be used by Wray and Godley to argue that the late-1990s US economic expansion was fundamentally unsustainable.
As one of the early developers of Modern Money Theory, Wray’s collection of books serves as a comprehensive primer for researchers of MMT, Minsky, and the history of money. Among his published volumes:
- Understanding MMT (2025), Edward Elgar Publications
- Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers (2023), edited by L. Randall Wray, Phil Armstrong, Sara Holland, Claire Jackson-Prior, Prue Plumridge, Neil Wilson, Edward Elgar
- Handbook of Economic Stagnation (2022), with Flavia Dantas, Academic Press, Elsevier
Wray’s work continues to inform the Levy Institute’s research and shapes how students critically engage with the assumptions underlying contemporary economic thought.
You can read his 2025 keynote for our summer seminar here.
Levy Distinguished Scholar and member of the six wise men of the British Treasury, Wynne Godley developed the SFC model, a framework so effective it was cited by Goldman Sachs’ chief economist as generating “the most important chart in the world.” Next week, stay tuned for a special Levy at 40 podcast episode with Scholars Gennaro Zezza, Michalis Nikiforos, and Claudio H. Dos Santos as they discuss the life and legacy of Wynne Godley.
Longtime head of the Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team, Godley’s work focused on the strategic prospects for the US, UK, and world economies, and the use of accounting macroeconomic models to reveal structural imbalances.
His 1998 paper with Anwar Shaikh identified an inconsistency at the heart of the standard macro model’s treatment of the distribution of income.
Godley’s 1999 landmark report, “Seven Unsustainable Processes” challenged the prevailing optimism about the US economy’s prospects, arguing that its expansion rested on unsustainable processes that would eventually trigger prolonged recession.
In 2000, Godley and Lavoie presented a simple growth model in “Kaleckian Models of Growth in a Stock-flow Monetary Framework.” This model was grounded in a stock-flow monetary accounting framework such that credit, money, equities and stocks of real capital link periods of time with one another in articulated sequences.
The year before the 2007-9 Great Recession broke out in the United States, Wynne Godley and Gennaro Zezza warned of the decisive importance of the path of lending for the medium-term future of the US economy in “Debt and Lending.”