person
Hyman Minsky
American economist (1919–1996). Author of the financial-instability hypothesis. Largely overlooked by the mainstream during his lifetime; rediscovered after 2008, when "Minsky moment" entered the financial-press vocabulary as a description of speculative-credit unwinding.
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Hyman P. Minsky spent most of his career at Washington University in St. Louis, with his final years at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. The financial-instability hypothesis — articulated across several papers in the 1970s and 1980s and given its most thorough exposition in Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (1986) — argues that capitalist financial structures evolve endogenously through three stages of fragility: hedge financing (debt service from operating cash flow), speculative financing (debt service requires asset appreciation or refinancing), and Ponzi financing (debt service requires constant new lending). Long expansions push the marginal financial unit toward Ponzi structures; the transition from hedge to Ponzi is endogenous, and the unwinding is what produces a crisis.
Minsky’s lifetime mainstream reception was minimal. His revival after 2008 was substantial: “Minsky moment” entered the financial press in 2007–2008 as a description of speculative-credit unwinding; the Post-Keynesian tradition’s broader visibility in the post-crisis era owes much to his rediscovery. His framework has been formalised in stock-flow consistent (SFC) terms by Marc Lavoie, Wynne Godley, and others; it remains outside mainstream DSGE practice but is taken seriously in macro-prudential policy work.