What happens in crashes? a non-equilibrium, value-theoretic approach to liquidity preference

This paper, presented at the 1998 conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy in Lisbon, shows how variations in the value of money, and in the exchange rate between different moneys of account, lead to transfers of value on the one hand between national or continental monetary blocs and on the other, between the financial and productive sectors of a single national economy. It discusses how these transfers may serve as the mechanism underlying the business cycle and suggests that they may also account for the phenomenon of liquidity preference. It suggests that the concept of liquidity preference constitutes a potential common ground between value-theoretic and post-Keynesian schools of thought. It is set against the background of the 1997 Asian crisis and reflects on the role and reliability of the economics profession.