PERSON
Hyman Minsky
American economist (1919–1996) whose Financial Instability Hypothesis was largely ignored during his lifetime and became essential after the 2008 crisis — the theorist who insisted that capitalism generates its own crises.
Hyman Philip Minsky (1919–1996) was an American economist whose work on financial instability occupied the margins of the profession during his lifetime and became central to contemporary macroeconomics after the 2008 global financial crisis made his framework impossible to ignore. Born in Chicago to socialist immigrant parents, Minsky studied mathematics at the University of Chicago before completing his doctorate at Harvard under Joseph Schumpeter and Wassily Leontief. He spent most of his academic career at Washington University in St. Louis and was affiliated with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in his later years. His central contribution — the Financial Instability Hypothesis — argues that capitalist economies endogenously generate fragility during periods of prosperity, and that stability itself breeds instability as rational actors progressively reduce margins of safety during calm periods. The phrase "Minsky moment," coined by Paul McCulley in 1998 and popularized during the 2008 crisis, entered the global financial lexicon as shorthand for the sudden collapse of asset values that follows a prolonged