Post-Keynesian economics in the context of "Irving Fisher"

Larry Randall Wray (born June 19, 1953) is a professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, whose faculty he joined in August 1999, and a professor at the University of Denver, where he served from 1987 to 1999. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Rome, Italy, the University of Paris, France, and the UNAM, in Mexico City. From 1994 to 1995 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bologna. From 2015 he is a visiting professor at the University of Bergamo, located in Italy. He was a visiting professor at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.

Wray is a past president of the Association for Institutional Thought and served on the board of directors of the Association for Evolutionary Economics. He has served, along with fellow post-Keynesian William Mitchell of the Charles Darwin University, Australia, as co-editor of the International Journal of Environment, Workplace, and Employment.

Heterodox economics is a broad, relative term referring to schools of economic thought which are not commonly perceived as belonging to mainstream economics. There is no absolute definition of what constitutes heterodox economic thought, as it is defined in contrast to the most prominent, influential or popular schools of thought in a given time and place.

Groups typically classed as heterodox in current discourse include the Austrian, ecological, Marxist-historical, post-Keynesian, and modern monetary approaches.

The credit cycle is the expansion and contraction of access to credit over time. Some economists, including Barry Eichengreen, Hyman Minsky, and other Post-Keynesian economists, and members of the Austrian school, regard credit cycles as the fundamental process driving the business cycle. However, mainstream economists believe that the credit cycle cannot fully explain the phenomenon of business cycles, with long term changes in national savings rates, and fiscal and monetary policy, and related multipliers also being important factors. Investor Ray Dalio has counted the credit cycle, together with the debt cycle, the wealth gap cycle and the global geopolitical cycle, among the main forces that drive worldwide shifts in wealth and power.

During an expansion of credit, asset prices are bid up by those with access to leveraged capital. This asset price inflation can then cause an unsustainable speculative price "bubble" to develop. The upswing in new money creation also increases the money supply for real goods and services, thereby stimulating economic activity and fostering growth in national income and employment.