50 Comments

Surprisingly easy to understand.

Expand full comment

Great article!

Expand full comment

It seems that the concept of the "Minsky Moment" is spreading through the mainstream as I have seen more references to it over the past few years. Unfortunately, I don't think it has reached the Fed and Jerry Powell.

Or, is it that their desire to suppress wages and grow the "reserve army of the unemployed" is more important than financial stability? From my POV it looks like the Fed is violating both sides of their dual mandate to promote financial stability and full employment.

It is, however, clarifying to see Powell admit that wage suppression is the goal. The wealthy elites running this economy really do hate the working class and they seem to find great pleasure in beating them down. Sad and disgusting.

Expand full comment

Very simple and insightful

Expand full comment

Isn't the fiscal situation in the last year or so amplifying this?

Expand full comment

"It’s basically about the relationship between income and debt and how it evolves over time."

Correct. And the answer is guaranteeing that individual agents always have a decent level of income...so that all but illegitimate commercial agents can compete in an ACTUALLY stabilized system. Illegitimate as in private finance because as I have posted here before it is always an exterior to the actual productive process incredibly costly and domineeringly profitable force injected either pre-production or post retail sale exposing it as a complete and de-stabilizing parasite.

If you don't see this its largely because of the last 5000 years of the acculturation of the present paradigm for the creation and distribution of new money, that is Debt Only, is blinding you.

Unfortunately the truth is there has been no actual evolution from the current paradigm AT ALL. New paradigms expose erudition as simply hide bound reformist orthodoxy. I'm sorry, study historical paradigm changes. Paradigms like wisdom insights are deep truthful simplicities. That's why I titled my book Wisdomics-Gracenomics...because what we need to do is rise to wisdom, and because the pinnacle concept of wisdom according to ALL of the world's wisdom traditions is the natural philosophical concept of grace as in love in personal action...and systemic policy...unless we just want to illogically deny/ignore the value of wisdom, especially in our temporal affairs.

Expand full comment

Thanks Stephanie for explaining it so I can understand it.

I don't think you should consider becoming an artist :)

Expand full comment

Easy to understand when presented well.

Expand full comment

This is brilliant

Expand full comment

I didn't know that Ponzi schemes or enterprises were numerous and always with us. Social Security has been called one; at the time, I thought how outrageous, but Minsky explains here that just not enough money is flowing in to keep the system in operation, so it had to sell off assets to survive. So it's not necessarily pure evil, although it can be.

By the way, I've also read that Social Security is a major governmental success, a program that really helps a lot of people and paid for itself until Congress borrowed heavily from it and never paid it back. Now it must depend on Congress to bail it out if it wants to pay full benefits in perpetuity. (I'm depending on memory for all that.)

Expand full comment

Why do we even need a Fed? It's an instrument to help the banks and not the people. If the goal of society is to raise all boats the cost of money should be kept very low. The drastic increase in interest rates is extremely inflationary. The banks gain and the people and small business' lose. What I'm wondering is this "October Surprise" by design to build up the oligarchy at great expense to the people. As a retiree, God Bless the staying power of indexing of Social Security. Curse any stiff arm politician who would privatize that system to gain political contributions.

Expand full comment

Thanks, really clear explanation

Expand full comment

I harbor the suspicion that at some deep level, people at the Fed and others in government understand all this very well. Even so, they're proceeding on the current likely disastrous course because to do otherwise would risk revealing how finance and the economy really work to the broader public.

Expand full comment

So, do we live with fragility or are there recommended policy actions for getting more Hedge units than Ponzi units into the system?

Expand full comment

Go crypto! 😳

Expand full comment

Does the model assume no particular regulation that creates, for example, hedge incentives? IOW could automatic stabilizers manage the risk distribution?

Expand full comment