As Tyler Cowen argues, there are many similarities between Hayek’s and Minsky’s views on business cycles. Fundamentally, they both describe the “fundamental impossibility in maintaining orderly credit relations over time”.

Minsky saw Keynes’ theory as an ‘investment theory of the business cycle’ and his contribution as being a ‘financial theory of investment’. This financial theory was based on the credit/financing-focused endogenous theory of money of Joseph Schumpeter, whom Minsky studied under. Schumpeter’s views are best described in Chapter 3 (’Credit and Capital’) of his book ‘Theory of Economic Development’. The gist of this view is that “investment, and expenditures more generally, require financing, not saving” (Borio and Disyatat).

Schumpeter viewed the ability of banks to create money ex nihilo as the differentia specifica of capitalism. He saw bankers as ‘capitalists par excellence’ and viewed this ‘elastic’ nature of credit as an unambiguously positive phenomenon. Many people see Schumpeter’s view of money and banking as the antithesis of the Austrian view. But as Agnes Festre has highlighted, Hayek had a very similar view on the empirical reality of the credit process. Hayek however saw this elasticity of the monetary supply as a negative phenomenon. The similarity between Hayek and Minksy comes from the fact that Minsky also focused on the downside of an elastic monetary system in which overextension of credit was inevitably brought back to a halt by the violent snapback of the Minsky Moment.

Where Hayek and Minsky differed was that Minsky favoured a comprehensive stabilisation of the financial and monetary system through fiscal and monetary intervention after the Minsky moment. Hayek only supported the prevention of secondary deflationary spirals. Minsky supported aggressive and early monetary interventions (e.g. lender-of-last-resort programs) as well as fiscal stimulus. However, although Minsky supported stabilisation he was well aware of the damaging long-run consequences of stabilising the economic system. He understood that such a system would inevitably deteriorate into crony capitalism if fundamental reforms did not follow the stabilisation. Minsky supported a “policy strategy that emphasizes high consumption, constraints upon income inequality, and limitations upon permissible liability structures”. He also advocated “an industrial-organization strategy that limits the power of institutionalized giant firms”. Minsky was under no illusions that a stabilised capitalist economy could carry on with business as usual.

I disagree with Minsky on two fundamental points - I believe that a capitalist economy with sufficient low-level instability is resilient. Allow small failures of banks and financial players, tolerate small recessions and we can dramatically reduce the impact and probability of large-scale catastrophic recessions such as the 2008 financial crisis. A little bit of chaos is an essential ingredient in a resilient capitalist economy. I also believe that we must avoid stamping out the disturbance at its source and instead focus our efforts on mitigating the wider impact of the disturbance on the masses. In other words, bail out the masses with helicopter drops rather than bailing out the banks.

But although I disagree with Minsky his ideas are coherent. The same cannot be said for the current popular interpretation of Minsky which believes that so long as we deal with sufficient force when the Minsky moment arrives, capitalism can carry on as usual. As Minsky has argued in his book ‘John Maynard Keynes’, and as I have argued based on experiences in stabilising other complex adaptive systems such as rivers, forest fires and our brain, stabilised capitalism is an oxymoron.

What about Hayek’s views on credit elasticity? As I argued in an earlier post, “we live in a world where maturity transformation is no longer required to meet our investment needs. The evolution and malformation of the financial system means that Hayek’s analysis is more relevant now than it probably was during his own lifetime”. An elastic credit system is no longer beneficial to economic growth in the modern economy. This does not mean that we should ban the process of endogenous credit creation - it simply means that we must allow the maturity-transforming entities to collapse when they get in trouble1.

  1. Because we do not need an elastic, maturity-transforming financial system, we can firewall basic deposit banking from risky finance. This will enable us to allow the banks to fail when the next crisis hits us. The solution is not to ban casino banking but to suck the lifeblood out of it by constructing an alternative 100% reserve-like system. I have advocated that each resident should be given a deposit account with the central bank which can be backed by Treasuries, a ‘public option’ for basic deposit banking. John Cochrane has also argued for a similar system. In his words, “the Federal Reserve should continue to provide abundant reserves to banks, paying market interest. The Treasury could offer reserves to the rest of us—floating-rate, fixed-value, electronically-transferable debt. There is no reason that the Fed and Treasury should artificially starve the economy of completely safe, interest-paying cash”. ↩

Comments

Matthew

What are the arguments against a public option for basic deposit banking? I think it's a great idea and the existing post office infrastructure is sufficient to get a system started with little investment. Some ideas: Incumbent banks will lobby heavily against it Small gov't types will call it an unprecedented expansion of gov't power Germany has a bank/post office option (Postbank) but it is privately owned. What else would a reasonable person object to?