From the village fair to Wall Street. The Italian reception of Minsky’s economic thought

The scientific, and human, relationship of Hyman P. Minsky with Italy and its scholars has been very close since the mid-1970s. Minsky’s economic thought has influenced three generations of Italian economists, and it keeps on affecting young scholars who do not settle for mainstream economics narration. Outlines of Minsky’s thought can be found not only in the works of Italian post-Keynesians, but also in the reflections of other heterodox economists and even in a number of contributions by ‘border’ authors. This paper aims to provide an overview of the Italian reception of Minsky’s analysis of financial fragility and economic instability. More precisely, we will show that this reception has been characterized by the attempt to renew and improve Minsky’s thought by cross-breeding it with more powerful analytical tools, as well as with inputs from other theoretical approaches: the ‘New Keynesian’ theory of information asymmetry and the Marxian theory of money and crisis; the Franco-Italian theory of monetary circuit and the New Cambridge ‘stock-flow consistent’ modeling; Goodwin’s theory of business cycle and the ‘agent-based modeling’ of financial instability. All these attempts share the stress on the dynamic and unstable nature of capitalism, regarded as a ‘financially sophisticated’ monetary economy of production – in the wake of Minsky’s well-known ‘Wall Street paradigm’.