The essays in this volume explain the key structural features of financial inflation that give rise to financial crisis. These features include excessive reliance on finance to maintain economic activity through rising asset prices. Reliance on asset inflation induces a preoccupation with property values and a new social divide between the asset-rich and the asset-poor that undermines the culture of the welfare state. When debt can no longer be supported by cash flow from asset markets, excess debt plunges economies into economic depression.

This book provides a critique of the neoclassical explanations of the 2008 financial collapse, of the ensuing long recession and of the neoliberal austerity responses to it. The study argues that while the prevailing views of deregulation and financialization as instrumental culprits in the explosion and implosion of the financial bubble are not false, they fail to point out that financialization is essentially an indication of an advanced stage of capitalist development. These standard explanations tend to ignore the systemic dynamics of the accumulation of finance capital, the inherent limits to that accumulation, production and division of economic surplus, class relations, and the balance of social forces that mold economic policy. Instead of simply blaming the ‘irrational behavior’ of market players, as neoliberals do, or lax public supervision, as Keynesians do, this book focuses on the core dynamics of capitalist development that not only created the financial bubble, but also fostered the ‘irrational behavior’ of market players and subverted public policy. Due to its interdisciplinary perspective, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in economics, finance, politics and sociology.

Interest and Capital brings together Michał Kalecki's published fragments on monetary theory and policy to explore his distinctive approach to money and its circulation in the capitalist economy. Toporowski lays out Kalecki's critique of the international monetary arrangements proposed by Keynes and White at Bretton Woods, casting new light on the international monetary imbalances that have since disrupted the international economy. The greater importance of debt management revealed in Kalecki's monetary analysis makes it particularly relevant to the policy dilemmas of developing countries and governments facing high levels of debt in the wake of recent global crises. In Kalecki's theoretical approach, money has both an industrial and a financial circulation. Corporate finance takes its place at the centre of monetary considerations because it is the money of capitalists that is the autonomous determinant of expenditure in the economy. This theory has important implications for the rate of interest, which is not related to the rate of profit, nor to the kind of portfolio adjustments necessary to maintain portfolio equilibrium, but to the kind of financing that may prevail in any given phase of the business cycle.

The Elgar Companion to Post Keynesian Economics is a comprehensive guide to economic analyses in the tradition of Keynes and the so-called Cambridge (UK) school of economics. The coverage of themes and different theoretical orientations within Post Keynesianism is remarkable and the quality of the various entries is impressive. John Kings invisible hand is responsible for a minimum of overlaps and an optimum in quality and comprehensibility. This book has already proved to be of interest to a wide range of economists and can be expected to continue to do so for a long time to come. Heinz D. Kurz, University of Graz, Austria This thoroughly revised and updated second edition provides a comprehensive guide to Post Keynesian methodology, theory and policy prescriptions. The Companion reflects the challenges posed by the global financial crisis that began in 2008 and by the consolidation of the New Neoclassical Synthesis in macroeconomic theory. There are 41 entirely new entries, marking the emergence of a new generation of Post Keynesian scholars. The central issues that were dealt with in the first edition remain at the core of the book, but much more attention is paid in this second edition to financial markets, to Post Keynesian economics outside its traditional Anglo-American heartland and to gender issues and environmental policy. Including major theoretical, methodological and policy issues in Post Keynesian economics, this enriching Companion will strongly appeal to postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in economics as well as related social science disciplines including international political economy, international relations, politics, public policy and sociology.

The question of money, how to provide it, and how to acquire it where needed is axiomatic to development. The realities of global poverty and the inequalities between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ are clear and well documented, and the gaps between world’s richest and the world’s poorest are ever-increasing. But, even though funding development is assumed to be key, the relationship between finance and development is contested and complex. This book explores the variety of relationships between finance and development, offering a broad and critical understanding of these connections and perspectives. It breaks finance down into its various aspects, with separate chapters on aid, debt, equity, microfinance and remittances. Throughout the text, finance is presented as a double-edged sword: while it is a vital tool towards poverty reduction, helping to fund development, more critical approaches remind us of the ways in which finance can hinder development. It contains a range of case studies throughout to illustrate finance in practice, including, UK aid to India, debt in Zambia, Apple’s investment in China, microfinance in Mexico, government bond issues in Chile, and financial crisis in East Asia. The text develops and explores a number of themes throughout, such as the relationship between public and private sources of finance and debates about direct funding versus the allocation of credit through commercial financial markets. The book also explores finance and development interactions at various levels, from the global structure of finance through to local and everyday practices. Global Finance and Development offers a critical understanding of the nature of finance and development. This book encourages the reader to see financial processes as embedded within the broader structure of social relationships. Finance is defined and demonstrated to be money and credit, but also, crucially, the social relationships and institutions that enable the creation and distribution of credit and the consequences thereof. This valuable text is essential reading for all those concerned with poverty, inequality and development.

Amidst a capitalist crisis that has upturned mainstream orthodoxies, this title underscores the importance of historical and materialist understandings of capitalist economies. It exposes the limitations of neoclassical economics' endogenous growth theory and how it, in fact, gropes for understandings well established within Marxism.

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.