IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/elg/rokejn/v6y2018i1p62-82.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The endogenous finance of global-dollar-based financial fragility in the 2000s: a Minskyan approach

Author

Listed:
  • Junji Tokunaga

    (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Dokkyo University, Saitama, Japan)

  • Gerald Epstein

    (Professor, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Co-Director, PERI (Political Economy Research Institute), Amherst, MA, USA)

Abstract

Global financing patterns have been at the center of debates about the global financial crisis in recent years. The 'global saving glut' (GSG) view, a prominent hypothesis, attributes the emergence of the global financial crisis to an excess of saving over investment, mirroring the current-account surplus, in emerging market countries. Crucially, according to this view, the financial crisis was triggered by an external and exogenous driver, not the shadow banking system in advanced countries which was the epicenter of the financial crisis. Instead, we argue that the global financial crisis was inherently caused by the endogenously dynamic process of balance-sheet expansion at a handful of large complex financial institutions (LCFIs) in the US and Europe. Importantly, this process was facilitated by the endogenous finance of the global dollar in the shadow banking system in the 2000s before the financial crisis. The endogenous finance of the global dollar became highly elastic during 2004–2006, accelerating the dynamically overstretched nature of balance sheets at LCFIs that contributed to the build-up of global financial fragility. Thus, the supreme position of the US dollar as a debt-financing currency in the shadow banking system, underpinned by the dominant role of the dollar in the development of new financial innovations and instruments, was an important, but underappreciated, driving force in this endogenously dynamic and ultimately destructive process.

Suggested Citation

  • Junji Tokunaga & Gerald Epstein, 2018. "The endogenous finance of global-dollar-based financial fragility in the 2000s: a Minskyan approach," Review of Keynesian Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, vol. 6(1), pages 62-82, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:elg:rokejn:v:6:y:2018:i:1:p62-82
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/journals/roke/6-1/roke.2018.01.04.xml
    Download Restriction: Restricted access
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ozgur, Gokcer, 2023. "The cross-border interconnectedness of shadow banking," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    endogenous money; financial fragility hypothesis; global financial crisis; global imbalances; gross capital flows; large complex financial institutions (LCFIs); shadow banking system; US dollar;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E12 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - Keynes; Keynesian; Post-Keynesian; Modern Monetary Theory
    • F30 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - General
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
    • G24 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Investment Banking; Venture Capital; Brokerage

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:elg:rokejn:v:6:y:2018:i:1:p62-82. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Phillip Thompson (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elgaronline.com/roke .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.