Joseph Schumpeter


 * Joseph Alois Schumpeter (8 February 1883 – 8 January 1950) was an Austrian-born American economist and political scientist. He briefly served as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932 he became a professor at Harvard University where he remained until the end of his career. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Schumpeter popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.


 * "A “conservative Marxist”, as Minsky would later characterize his mentor, Schumpeter’s earliest work on the Theory of Economic Development (1912) had emphasized the importance of money creation by the banking system as the crucial source of entrepreneurial finance. Banks can and do lend by creating deposits, which serve as purchasing power that entrepreneurs use to acquire the real resources they need in order to make their future plans into present realities. This mechanism, according to Schumpeter, is the source of the dynamism of capitalism, just as it is also, according to Simons, the source of capitalism’s instability."-  Perry Mehrling