CONCEPT
Minsky Moment
The sudden collapse of asset values that follows prolonged speculative buildup — the moment when the distribution of positions shifts from hidden fragility to visible insolvency, and the system discovers what the boom concealed.
The Minsky moment is the inflection point at which the endogenously generated fragility of a financial system is revealed through a cascading repricing of assets. Coined by economist Paul McCulley in 1998 to describe the Russian debt crisis, the term entered global financial vocabulary after the 2008 crisis and has since been applied to speculative collapses across sectors and decades. The moment is characterized by the rapid transition from apparent stability to visible crisis: positions that appeared sound reveal themselves as speculative or Ponzi, refinancing becomes impossible, and the cascade spreads through the interconnected balance sheets of the system. The Opus 4.6 simulation identifies the early 2026 SaaSpocalypse — the trillion-dollar repricing of software-as-a-service companies — as a textbook Minsky moment in the AI economy's transition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Minsky moment is not a failure of the system. It is a feature of how the system works. The moment arrives because the boom has progressively