Credit and Crisis from Marx to Minsky

Jan Toporowski, Professor of Economics and Finance, SOAS University of London, UK, Visiting Professor of Economics and Finance, International University College, Turin, and Visiting Professor of Economics, University of Bergamo, Italy

'Jan Toporowski provides a provocative guide to a dissenting tradition in macroeconomics where monetary and financial institutions are just as fundamental to the market economy's performance as real factors - endowments, tastes, technology, etc. Along his route from Marx to Minsky we naturally encounter the likes of Keynes and Kalecki, but also, more surprisingly, proto-monetarists like Fisher, Hawtrey, and Henry Simons. Whatever our own views, Toporowski forces us to look at today's macroeconomics in a refreshingly new light: highly recommended.'--David Laidler, University of Western Ontario, US'Professor Jan Toporowski offers us a brilliant piece of scholarship combining history of money and credit theories ranging over heterodox economists from Marx and Luxemburg to mainstream but radical economists such as Keynes and Minsky. It is a here and now explanation of our problems.'--Lord Meghnad Desai, London School of Economics, UK

• Contents: PART I: CAPITALISM AND FINANCIAL CRISIS 1. Marx and the Monetary Business Cycle 2. Marx and the Emergence of Debt Markets 3. Rosa Luxemburg and the Marxists on Finance PART II: CRITICAL THEORIES OF FINANCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: UNSTABLE MONEY AND FINANCE 4. Ralph Hawtrey and the Monetary Business Cycle 5. Irving Fisher and Debt Deflation 6. John Maynard Keynes’s Financial Theory of Under-Investment I: Towards Doubt 7. John Maynard Keynes’s Financial Theory of Under-Investment II: Towards Uncertainty PART III: CRITICAL THEORIES OF FINANCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: CORPORATE DEBT AND CRISIS 8. The Principle Of Increasing Risk: Marek Breit 9. The Principle Of Increasing Risk: Michal Kalecki 10. The Principle of Increasing Risk: Josef Steindl and Michal Kalecki on Profits and Finance 11. The Kalecki-Steindl theory of financial fragility PART IV: CRITICAL THEORIES OF FINANCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE FINANCIAL INSTABILITY HYPOTHESIS 12. The Monetary Theory of Kalecki and Minsky 13. From Money to Minsky: Henry Simons 14. The Financial Instability Hypothesis Bibliography Index