Was Hyman Minsky a post-Keynesian economist?

Abstract

As the subprime financial crisis erupted in 2008, Wall Street analysts started talking of the Minsky moment. Hyman Minsky’s out-of-print 1986 book, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, would then sell for hundreds of dollars on the internet, until it was reprinted. The paper recollects the main features of Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis that became so popular in the aftermath of the failure of Lehman’s Brothers despite having been totally ignored by mainstream economists until then. It also recalls other important contributions of Minsky to our understanding of a monetized production economy, some of which were quite premonitory. In the second part of the paper, the author mentions what can be considered as weaknesses of Minsky’s theoretical framework, which should be avoided in future work. The third part deals with the controversial issue of whether or not Minsky was a post-Keynesian, or considered himself to be part of the post-Keynesian school of thought. The author concludes that indeed Minsky clearly stood in the post-Keynesian camp.