Minsky

Hyman Philip Minsky (September 23, 1919 – October 24, 1996) was an Americaneconomist, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis, and a distinguished scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His research attempted to provide an understanding and explanation of the characteristics of financial crises, which he attributed to swings in a potentially fragile financial system. Minsky is sometimes described as a post-Keynesian economist because, in the Keynesian tradition, he supported some government intervention in financial markets, opposed some of the financial deregulation policies popular in the 1980s, stressed the importance of the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort and argued against the over-accumulation of private debt in the financial markets.^[1]

Minsky's economic theories were largely ignored for decades, until the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 caused a renewed interest in them.

Minsky proposed theories linking financial market fragility, in the normal life cycle of an economy, with speculative investment bubblesendogenous to financial markets. Minsky claimed that in prosperous times, when corporate cash flow rises beyond what is needed to pay off debt, a speculative euphoria develops, and soon thereafter debts exceed what borrowers can pay off from their incoming revenues, which in turn produces a financial crisis. As a result of such speculative borrowing bubbles, banks and lenders tighten credit availability, even to companies that can afford loans, and the economy subsequently contracts.

This slow movement of the financial system from stability to fragility, followed by crisis, is something for which Minsky is best known, and the phrase "Minsky moment" refers to this aspect of Minsky's academic work.

"He offered very good insights in the '60s and '70s when linkages between the financial markets and the economy were not as well understood as they are now," said Henry Kaufman, a Wall Street money manager and economist. "He showed us that financial markets could move frequently to excess. And he underscored the importance of the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort."^[4]

Minsky's model of the credit system, which he dubbed the "financial instability hypothesis" (FIH),^[5] incorporated many ideas already circulated by John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Knut Wicksell and Irving Fisher.^[6] "A fundamental characteristic of our economy," Minsky wrote in 1974, "is that the financial system swings between robustness and fragility and these swings are an integral part of the process that generates business cycles."^[7]

Disagreeing with many mainstream economists of the day, he argued that these swings, and the booms and busts that can accompany them, are inevitable in a so-called free market economy – unless government steps in to control them, through regulation, central bank action and other tools. Such mechanisms did in fact come into existence in response to crises such as the Panic of 1907 and the Great Depression. Minsky opposed the deregulation that characterized the 1980s.

It was at the University of California, Berkeley that seminars attended by Bank of America executives helped him to develop his theories about lending and economic activity, views he laid out in two books, John Maynard Keynes (1975), a classic study of the economist and his contributions, and Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (1986), and more than a hundred professional articles.

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Minsky

American economist Hyman Minsky, who died in 1996, grew up during the Great Depression, an event which shaped his views and set him on a crusade to explain how it happened and how a repeat could be prevented, writes Duncan Weldon.

Minsky spent his life on the margins of economics but his ideas suddenly gained currency with the 2007-08 financial crisis. To many, it seemed to offer one of the most plausible accounts of why it had happened.

His long out-of-print books were suddenly in high demand with copies changing hands for hundreds of dollars - not bad for densely written tomes with titles like Stabilizing an Unstable Economy.

Senior central bankers including current US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen and the Bank of England's Mervyn King began quoting his insights. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman named a high profile talk about the financial crisis The Night They Re-read Minsky.

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Hyman Minsky

FROM the start of his academic career in the 1950s until 1996, when he died, Hyman Minsky laboured in relative obscurity. His research about financial crises and their causes attracted a few devoted admirers but little mainstream attention: this newspaper cited him only once while he was alive, and it was but a brief mention. So it remained until 2007, when the subprime-mortgage crisis erupted in America. Suddenly, it seemed that everyone was turning to his writings as they tried to make sense of the mayhem. Brokers wrote notes to clients about the “Minsky moment” engulfing financial markets. Central bankers referred to his theories in their speeches. And he became a posthumous media star, with just about every major outlet giving column space and airtime to his ideas. The Economist has mentioned him in at least 30 articles since 2007.

If Minsky remained far from the limelight throughout his life, it is at least in part because his approach shunned academic conventions. He started his university education in mathematics but made little use of calculations when he shifted to economics, despite the discipline’s growing emphasis on quantitative methods. Instead, he pieced his views together in his essays, lectures and books, including one about John Maynard Keynes, the economist who most influenced his thinking. He also gained hands-on experience, serving on the board of Mark Twain Bank in St Louis, Missouri, where he taught.

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