Minsky and Hayek: Connections
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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.