Monetary System

My view as developed in that post is that debt is central to understanding economic systems, and not just because it has a redistributive element in apportioning losses between creditors and debtors when recession forces credit writedowns.…

Alan Holmes wrote in 1969 that "in the real world, banks extend credit, creating deposits in the process, and look for the reserves later." Holmes would turn in his grave at Krugman’s naïve assertion, half a century later, that banks need…

My friend Steve Keen recently presented a “primer” on Hyman Minsky. In his piece, Steve criticized the methodology used by Paul Krugman and argued that Krugman could learn a lot from Minsky. In particular Krugman’s equilibrium approach and…

The imminent passage of the fraud-friendly JOBS Act caused me to reflect on the fact that the worst anti-regulatory travesties in the financial sphere have had broad, bipartisan support. The Garn-St Germain Act of 1982, which deregulated…

Minsky's “Financial Instability Hypothesis” is one of the key foundations of Steve Keen's approach to economics. Minsky has come into vogue these days of course, but to people who’ve known his work for several decades rather than ever since…

The JOBS Act is insane on many levels. It creates an extraordinarily criminogenic environment in which securities fraud will become even more out of control. One of the forms of insanity is the belief that one can “win” a regulatory…

Bloomberg News allegedly has an e-mail demonstrating that Jon Corzine, MF Global's CEO, gave “direct instructions” to his underlings to transfer $200 million from one customer account to another account in order to meet an overdraft in one…

Yves Q. Smith spoke with Lauren Lyster on RT's Capital Account show this past Wednesday about Wall Street and Goldman Sachs. Her view is that the points highlighted by Greg Smith in his Op-Ed in the New York Times about Goldman Sachs are…

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Chris Whalen is a highly regarded banking analyst who has been quite critical of the goings on with banks and their regulators. However, he is very even-handed in his assessment of the Fed's latest stress tests of the largest 19 banks.