Terrific piece in the Boston Globe by professor Stephen Mihm on Hyman Minsky:
“Amid the hand-wringing and the self-flagellation, a few more cerebral commentators started to speak about the arrival of a “Minsky moment,” and a growing number of insiders began to warn of a coming “Minsky meltdown.”
“Minsky” was shorthand for Hyman Minsky, a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago. Many economists had never heard of him when the crisis struck, and he remains a shadowy figure in the profession. But lately he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through. A contrarian amid the conformity of postwar America, an expert in the then-unfashionable subfields of finance and crisis, Minsky was one economist who saw what was coming. He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.
In recent months Minsky’s star has only risen. Nobel Prize-winning economists talk about incorporating his insights, and copies of his books are back in print and selling well. He’s gone from being a nearly forgotten figure to a key player in the debate over how to fix the financial system.”
Its a very straight forward history of an up-until-recently under appreciated economist. (I enjoyed reading it a great deal).
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Source:
Why Capitalism Fails
Stephen Mihm
Boston Globe, September 13, 2009
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/13/why_capitalism_fails/
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