Date: Wednesday 25 February 2015
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Mark Hayes
Talk Title: 'Keynes,the Pope and the IMF Presentation’
Location: McGrath Centre, St Catharine's College
You can listen to the presentation HERE
Speaker
Mark Hayes is a Reader in Durham University and the Inaugural Holder of the St Hilda Chair in Catholic Social Thought and Practice in Durham’s Centre for Catholic Studies. He was until recently Fellow and Director of Studies in Economics at Robinson College, Cambridge, and remains an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Economics. He has written extensively on Keynes’s General Theory and is Secretary of the UK Post-Keynesian Economics Study Group (PKSG). His major monograph is The Economics of Keynes: A New Guide to The General Theory (Edward Elgar, 2006). He has also written on the economics of Fair Trade and on the Vatican’s thinking about the reform of the international financial and monetary system.
Talk Overview:
In this seminar, Mark Hayes will discuss Keynes’s surprisingly positive views on the medieval scholastic teaching on usury and draw upon the work of Keynes to argue that the traditional view of usury (understood as the charging of rent for the use of money) as anti-social is well-founded. Keynes’s understanding of the nature of probability allows a clear distinction to be made between debt and equity finance which most economists dismiss. Rather than meriting remuneration, the demand for the security provided by money against an uncertain future imposes a social cost in one form or another. This proposition is illustrated with reference to the problems of the modern international financial and monetary system, specifically the role of deposit insurance and the obstacles to a renewed system of managed exchange rates, without which many regions appear doomed to enduring long-term austerity.