Social Provisioning and Financial Regulation: An Institutionalist-Minskyian Agenda for Reform

I seek to put social provisioning into perspective with regard to the financial instability issue in capitalism. My analysis rests on an institutionalist-Minskyian endogenous instability assumption and maintains that monetary/financial stability is a peculiar public good or specific commons since it concerns all of society and its viability in time, not individuals involved in private financial relations. Consequently, the provision of financial stability becomes essentially a matter of public policy and requires the intervention of public power in order to prevent finance from becoming a public “bad.” This result relies on the distinction between private “normal” goods and ambivalent/transversal money (and related financial relations). I point to the necessity of a public organization and tight regulation of finance and financial markets, when standard equilibrium models assume that social optimum and stability can be provided by private self-adjustment and market prices mechanisms.