The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce that it will hold the second annual Minsky Summer Seminar June 18�26, 2011. The Seminar will provide a rigorous discussion of both the theoretical and applied aspects of Minsky�s economics, with an examination of meaningful prescriptive policies relevant to the current economic and financial crisis.

The Summer Seminar will be of particular interest to graduate students, recent graduates, and those at the beginning of their academic or professional careers. The teaching staff will include well-known economists concentrating on and expanding Minsky�s work.

Applications may be made to Susan Howard at the Levy Institute ([email protected]), and should include a current curriculum vitae. Admission will include provision of room and board on the Bard College campus. A limited number of small travel reimbursements of $100 for U.S. fellows and $300 for foreign fellows, respectively, will be available to participants.

Due to limited space availability, the deadline for applications is March 31, 2011.

The summer seminar program will be organized by Jan Kregel, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, and L. Randall Wray.

Europe�s trillion-dollar rescue package does not address the central problem: countries with very different economies are yoked to the same currency. Restructuring Greece�s debt with more favorable credit terms, for example, is merely a short-term fix.

President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray, and Yeva Nersisyan call for a more far-reaching solution in terms of a major reconstruction of the European project. They support a permanent fiscal arrangement, through which the central eurozone authorities distribute funds to member states. Ideally, this should be overseen by the equivalent of a national treasury responsible to the European Parliament. This arrangement would relieve pressures to adopt austerity measures, and limit borrowing from financial markets in order to finance deficits.

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The developed world faces a cyclical deficiency of aggregate demand, the product of a liquidity trap and the paradox of thrift, in the context of headwinds born of ongoing structural realignments. According to Paul McCulley, PIMCO, front-loaded fiscal austerity would only add to that deflationary cocktail. This is why the market vigilantes are fleeing risk assets, which depend on growth for valuation support, rather than the sovereign debt of fiat-currency countries.

McCulley bases his outlook on the financial balances approach (double-entry bookkeeping) pioneered by the late Levy Distinguished Scholar Wynne Godley. In McCulley�s view, Godley�s analytical framework should be the workhorse of discussions on global rebalancing. Current fiscal deficits in fiat-currency countries are not the cause but the consequence of the Great Recession, McCulley says. Without these deficits, we would be in a second Great Depression.

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