Fall 2025 Seminar Series: Money and Finance Idea Lab, Columbia Center for Political Economy
Registration link: https://forms.gle/DjCB8eLAJzhronwp7
Session 1: Keynes, Uncertainty, and the Liquidity Preference
Monday, November 3, 2025
Understanding the nature and effects of uncertainty was a central concern of John Maynard Keynes, from his Treatise on Probability in the early 1920s through, most famously, the General Theory in the latter half of the 1930s. At the heart of his contribution was a new focus on how expectations about the unknown future—and the conventions market actors and institutions develop to manage them—shape political and economic life.
This webinar brings together leading scholars to explore the political and economic dimensions of Keynes’ thinking on uncertainty, including how uncertainty is an essential backdrop that shapes liquidity provision and volatility in financial markets, contrasting it with current attempts to limit such uncertainty.
Speakers:
Stefan Eich
Georgetown University
Luca Fantacci
Università degli Studi di Milano
About the Fall 2025 Seminar Series
Economics has long sought to parse measurable risk from uncertainty (known unknowns) and radical uncertainty (unknown unknowns). Liquidity complicates these distinctions further, suggesting that uncertainty is even more central for financial markets. As John Maynard Keynes and Frank Knight both emphasized, the future is not always calculable in probabilistic terms; subjective expectations and judgment, rather than calculus, frequently govern decision-making. One of the ways that finance attempts to manage irreducible uncertainty is through the array of conventions, institutions, and instruments that make up liquidity provision and management. Yet the very practices aimed at rendering the uncertain certain also make finance inherently unstable. Liquidity is not a free good but a fragile convention, vulnerable to volatility and breakdown when uncertainty collides with crisis, maturity transformation, refinancing needs, or sudden shifts in expectations.
This seminar series examines the interrelation of liquidity and uncertainty, probing how markets and institutions organize around them and attempt to turn risk into uncertainty through financial conventions, and how crises reveal the limits of such approaches. Sessions will consider the theoretical underpinnings of uncertainty, the practices by which liquidity is provisioned, and the recurring instability that results when imperfect knowledge meets liquidity shortages. The series will convene through AY 2025-2026 and is open access (subject only to registration). Each session will be introduced by discussants before the seminar is opened for general discussion. Readings will be distributed in advance and made available online.
