'It' keeps almost happening: Post-Keynesian perspectives on the financial crisis and the great recession

The «‘it’» in the title comes from Hyman Minsky’s Can ‘It’ Happen Again, and refers to major economic downturns following financial crises, and the notion that such financial crises occur rather frequently but that policy measures tend to prevent the downturns developing into depressions on the scale of the 1930s. The paper explores two post-Keynesian perspectives on the financial crisis. The first that the financial sector is prone to booms and busts and that financial crises are an almost inevitable feature of the financial sector. The second relates to the ways in which imbalances between private sector savings and investment intentions are resolved and the implications of that for the build up of debt.