Interest and Capital: The Monetary Economics of Michał Kalecki

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge James Culham in providing feedback and clarifications to this review, as he is a true ‘money man’ while I am a ‘real man’–à la Kalecki (with apologies to GCH).

Notes

1 In a prior publication Toporowski clarifies this point: ‘the theories of “financialisation” that emerged from this Marxist analysis combine classic capitalism, characterised by bank borrowing (to which long-term finance is held to be equivalent), with underconsumption (linked to economic stagnation by many post-Keynesians, through an inadequate “wage share”). Theories of financialisation commonly have a Ricardian view of debt, in which debt is never an asset, as it is in a credit system, but a usurious claim on income’ (Toporowski 2018, 424).

2 From a HET perspective, Toporowski shows in this Chapter 9 that a very similar analysis to Kalecki–on internal government debt being an income transfer rather than a deduction from income–was developed 27 years earlier by Withers (1917), unbeknownst to Kalecki.