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Feb 212010

This is a classic paper that presents an alternative to the equilibrium-seeking view of the world. Hyman Minsky’s paper “The Financial Instability Hypothesis” was originally presented in the early 1990s, but was received greater recognition when the world started falling apart in 2007/2008.

Essentially, the paper dives into the conditions that can convert an economy from equilibrium-seeking to self-perpetuation:

Minsky identifies hedge, speculative, and Ponzi finance as distinct income-debt relations for economic units. He asserts that if hedge financing dominates, then the economy may well be an equilibrium-seeking and containing system: conversely, the greater the weight of speculative and Ponzi finance, the greater the likelihood that the economy is a “deviation-amplifying” system. Thus, the FIH suggests that over periods of prolonged prosperity, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance (stable) to a structure that increasingly emphasizes speculative and Ponzi finance (unstable).

Financial Instability Hypothesis working paper: LINK