ABSTRACT
As argued in Chapter 2, Minsky views the capitalist economy as a set of interrelated balance sheets and income statements as well as a complicated assemblage of cash-flow chains. In other words, he describes it as an aggregate of financial statements that are created by profit-seeking and forward-looking capitalists’ investments in long-life and expensive capital assets through debt-financing activities. He also examines the relationship between debt and cash flow at the macro-level from the perspective of corporate finance and applies corporate accounting methods to economics in his cash-flow approach. Furthermore, he studies the underlying financial transactions that are driven by capitalists’ activities and that create a fragile and unstable financial structure.1 In sum, Minsky applies the corporate finance approach to the empirical studies of his financial instability hypothesis at both the macro-and micro-levels.
