Hyman Minsky

Hyman Philip Minsky (1919–1996) was an American economist whose work on financial instability established the foundations of what is now called the Financial Instability Hypothesis. Minsky argued that capitalist economies do not naturally tend toward equilibrium but instead undergo endogenous cycles of speculative boom and crisis, driven by the migration of financing structures from safe to speculative to Ponzi. His work was marginalized during the neoclassical ascendancy of the late twentieth century but received renewed attention after the 2008 financial crisis, when its predictive power became impossible to ignore. Minsky's broader project was to show that macroeconomic stability is not a property of markets but a property of the institutional and regulatory architecture that constrains them.