why assume workers councils and global production/distribution to be incompatible?

the actually possible has never been static.

Not sure how pre 1917 council communism deals with globalized, complex chains of production and distribution in a world of densely populated urban areas, and with firms and households relying on long horizon financial commitments, specialized labor, etc.

We have to work with the world as it is, or point to plausible transitions that people are willing and able to take on.

For example, some people in the area I live in refer to themselves as locavores and attempt to eat food produced nearby, yet I doubt they would be willing to give up their morning coffee from Costa Rica. So it is important to think through what is actually possible given where we are today.

Regardless, maybe you are looking at an economy organized a along these lines (http://www.zcommunications.org/zparecon/pareconlac.htm).

Most of all, without falling into the trap of "money is just a veil for real exchange", I believe there is more room for bette mapping between financial and real sides of the economy.

Minsky made progress here, and from the Austrian side, I have found their emphasis on the actual structure of production – a mesoeconomic or Leontieff type of lens – helpful in realizing macro emphasis on aggregates can also conceal important consideration.

And I agree, macro may need to be refooted as an asset based economics, rather than an income flow based analysis alone. Keynes was heading there, but the Keynesians ignored much of this. Minsky certainly thought along these lines, although cash flow commitments ultimately ruled his models, and there are some economists associated with the Levy Institute on coherent stock/flow modeling which is promising.

Drop me an e-mail address and I can send some links that you may find useful. There are few who are willing to explore these alternative perspectives without all the polemics and ideological trappings that tend to come with them.

Though become senile, the system which exists today is, beneath all the superficialities, the same set of social relations of production and REproduction which existed a century and a half ago. Any talk of 'a new global growth model' must, at the least, recognize the capital system's historical relativity, its absolute limits, rather than constantly struggling to redefine and salvage the no longer progressive but become barbaric. Systems end, are – consciously and not – replaced.
My 'new model' preference would look towards traditions/practices of council communism [the 'infantile' which Lenin railed against and destroyed after the 1917 revolution].

Juan – Yes, Marx had something to say about the role of finance in the evolution of the economy. And there is a need for a new global growth model, as I argued in the post. The point is to figure out practical steps that can be taken in that respect. Quoting dead economists about why the system in place a century and a half ago would eventually fail doesn't get us there.

Todd – There is a strong emphasis on independent action in Austrian School contributions, no doubt. Personally, I think taking responsibility for one's actions and one's life is a good place to start, but it goes too far if it then leads to the notion we are all atomistic individuals, with no interdependence. But that's just my particular mental fetish.

The credit system appears as the main lever of over-production and over-speculation in commerce solely because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is here forced to its extreme limits, and is so forced because a large part of the social capital is employed by people who do not own it and who consequently tackle things quite differently than the owner, who anxiously weighs the limitations of his private capital in so far as he handles it himself. This simply demonstrates the fact that the self-expansion of capital based on the contradictory nature of capitalist production permits an actual free development only up to a certain point, so that in fact it constitutes an immanent fetter and barrier to production, which are continually broken through by the credit system.[4] Hence, the credit system accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the establishment of the world-market. It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise these material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection. At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction — crises — and thereby the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production.

The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production. It is this ambiguous nature, which endows the principal spokesmen of credit from Law to Isaac Péreire with the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.
[Written sometime between 1863 and 1867]

It is really just another mental fetish, like all ideologies.

As far as Minsky goes – IMO, his biggest contribution was NOT the Financial Instability Hypothesis, but rather his basic insight that before production can even take place, real investment must take place and before real investment can take place that investment must be financed, and thus it is the structure of these financial arrangements that determine the state of the economy. This element of financing investment for future production is completely missing from neoclassical models of production as the instantaneous exchange of factors for finished goods. The simplest way of saying this is that mainstream economics is completely focused on the income statement and completely ignorant of the balance sheet. Richard Koo is adding a lot of insight here with his work (though he seems largely ignorant or dismissive of Minsky for some reason).

–RueTheDay