"The purpose of this paper is to provide an exposition of Veblen's and Minsky's views on the financial markets and to explore the possibility of any common denominators. I stress that they both bring forward the importance of leverage as a path-breaking insight, as well as of liquidity and solvency in the real-world financial markets characterized by uncertainty, innovations and evolving institutions. I remark that Veblenian and Minskian financial markets are naturally and endogenously unstable, nonneutral and influence ‘real' economic performance. I argue that if Veblen's institutional logic in his business enterprise system became integrated with Minsky's financial processes of creation and destruction, it could set up a realistic framework to analyse the evolution of financial markets in capitalism."

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