Session 2, Fall 2025 Seminar Series: Money and Finance Idea Lab, Columbia Center for Political Economy
Monday, December 1, 2025 (at 3:00 pm EST // 9:00pm CET)
Registration link: https://forms.gle/Px374pE34VmnAyW96
A central challenge for capitalist economies is managing the radical uncertainty that impacts investment decisions and long-term expectations. Building on Keynes' insights—explored in the prior session—into uncertainty and the liquidity preference, this session examines how the postwar American state developed strategies and institutional mechanisms to transform uncertainty into calculable risk for the private sector. Against the backdrop of late twentieth-century crises—the oil crisis of the 1970s, a series of financial crises, domestic and international economic disruptions, the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC), and a global pandemic—public actors crafted policies designed to stabilize financial markets by providing liquidity backstops, fundamentally reshaping who bears risk in modern capitalism.
To investigate these issues, this webinar will explore how the United States has responded to financial market uncertainty through liquidity provision and the ideological foundations that have shaped these interventions. Examining how state policy has attempted to manage long-term expectations and investment decisions, it will also unpack how underlying conceptions of money, liquidity, and uncertainty inform the architecture of financial governance in contemporary American capitalism.
Speakers:
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.
