Summary Winter 2018

This issue of the Summary opens with a public policy brief that suggests looking to the postwar clearing union proposals made by John Maynard Keynes and Richard Kahn for insight into possible reforms of the current eurozone financial system. Two policy notes featured in this issue focus on current policy in the United States: the first addresses the feasibility of the Trump administration’s campaign promises to the middle class; and the second calls for the implementation of a universal single-payer health system. A third policy note argues that the relationship between time poverty and income poverty must be recognized in policy creation if the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are to be met.

Working papers included in this issue: examine the determinants of long-term interest rates for US Treasury securities; build a stock-flow consistent model to assess the relationship between quantitative easing and economic instability; use the Minskyan concept of financial fragility to assess the financial soundness of electricity distribution companies in Brazil; discuss the origins of the “science” of economics from its beginnings in the political economy of Adam Smith; survey Minsky’s contributions to the financialization literature for answers to today’s pressing economic issues; and suggest the application of strategies for containing disease epidemics to reduce the socioeconomic costs of unemployment.

INSTITUTE RESEARCH
Program: The State of the US and World Economies

• JAN KREGEL, A Two-Tier Eurozone or a Euro of Regions? A Radical Proposal Based on Keynes’s Clearing Union
• TANWEER AKRAM and HUIQING LI, An Inquiry Concerning Long-term US Interest Rates Using Monthly Data

 
Program: Monetary Policy and Financial Structure

• JAN KREGEL, The Concert of Interests in the Age of Trump
• CAMERON HAAS and TAI YOUNG-TAFT, Quantitative Easing and Asset Bubbles in a Stock-flow Consistent Framework
• ERNANI TEIXEIRA TORRES FILHO, NORBERTO MONTANI MARTINS, and CAROLINE YUKARI MIAGUTI, Minsky’s Financial Fragility: An Empirical Analysis of Electricity Distribution Companies in Brazil (2007–15)
• OSCAR VALDES VIERA, The Neoclassicals’ Conundrum: If Adam Smith is the Father of Economics, It Is a Bastard Child
• CHARLES WHALEN, Understanding Financialization: Standing on the Shoulders of Minsky

 
Program: The Distribution of Wealth and Income

• AJIT ZACHARIAS, How Time Deficits and Hidden Poverty Undermine the Sustainable Development Goals

 
Program: Economic Policy for the 21st Century

• L. RANDALL WRAY, Why the Compulsive Shift to Single Payer? Because Healthcare Is Not Insurable
• PAVLINA TCHERNEVA, Unemployment: The Silent Epidemic

 
INSTITUTE NEWS
Upcoming Events

• 27th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference
• The Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar

 
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

• Recent Levy Institute Publications