Minsky moment

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pages: 267 words: 71,123

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Over time, the perception that debt is safe leads to more relaxed lending standards; businesses and families alike develop the habit of borrowing; and the overall level of leverage in the economy rises. All of which, of course, sets the stage for future catastrophe. At some point there is a “Minsky moment,” a phrase coined by the economist Paul McCulley of the bond fund Pimco. This moment is also sometimes known as a Wile E. Coyote moment, after the cartoon character known for running off cliffs, then hanging suspended in midair until he looks down—for only then, according to the laws of cartoon physics, does he plunge. Once debt levels are high enough, anything can trigger the Minsky moment—a run-of-the-mill recession, the popping of a housing bubble, and so on. The immediate cause hardly matters; the important thing is that lenders rediscover the risks of debt, debtors are forced to start deleveraging, and Fisher’s debt-deflation spiral begins.

Furthermore, bank runs can be contagious, both because panic may spread to other banks and because one bank’s fire sales, by driving down the value of other banks’ assets, can push those other banks into the same kind of financial distress. As some readers may already have noticed, there’s a clear family resemblance between the logic of bank runs—­especially contagious bank runs—and that of the Minsky moment, in which everyone simultaneously tries to pay down debt. The main difference is that high levels of debt and leverage in the economy as a whole, making a Minsky moment possible, happen only occasionally, whereas banks are normally leveraged enough that a sudden loss of confidence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The possibility of bank runs is more or less inherent in the nature of banking.

CONTENTS Introduction What Do We Do Now? One How Bad Things Are Two Depression Economics Three The Minsky Moment Four Bankers Gone Wild Five The Second Gilded Age Six Dark Age Economics Seven Anatomy of an Inadequate Response Eight But What about the Deficit?


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Minsky’s message, which Krugman says economists failed to heed until 2008, was that once an economy is deeply in debt, virtually any event (however small) can trigger a catastrophic collapse. Although many economists, commentators, and analysts were discussing the emergence (both in theory and in fact) of the Minsky moment during 2008, what they were in fact witnessing was arguably the culmination of a Minsky half century. This era would have spanned the entire post–World War II period, during which the Wall Street system was transforming capitalism, leading to a succession of Minsky moments, as well as a financial system in which fraudulent activity was increasingly being seen as part of “normal” business practice. This was a period culminating not just in the subprime crisis, but also in the LIBOR affair (a series of fraudulent actions connected to the LIBOR, London Interbank Offered Rate, and also the resulting investigation and reaction).

It was first used by Paul McCulley (of the California-based investment management company, Pimco) to describe the 1998 Russian crisis. “Yesterday’s 50 basis-point Fed funds rate cut was a very positive signal that Fed policy makers grasp that we’re facing a debt-deflation Minsky Moment,” he warned in January 2001 (McCulley 2001a: 4). Three months later, he wrote, “Macroeconomic life after bubbles is not a self-correcting process of renewal, but a self-feeding process of debt deflation—to wit, it’s a Minsky Moment” (McCulley 2001b: 4). 40 This expression was first used in relation to the bailout of Continental Illinois in 1984. 41 Irving Fisher also captured the dynamics of debt deflation in “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions” (Fisher 1933). 42 Money manager capitalism refers to an economy dominated by fund managers as opposed to banks.

In April 2006, the IMF’s “Global Financial Stability Report” noted a “growing recognition that the dispersion of credit risk by banks to a broader and more diverse group of investors, rather than warehousing such risks on their balance sheets, has helped to make the banking and overall financial system more resilient” (IMF 2006: 51). By 2008, the phrase “Minsky moment”39—when overindebted investors are forced to sell even their good assets to pay off their debt—had become as much a part of the lexicon surrounding the crisis as “too big to fail.”40 According to Paul Krugman, Minsky had previously been quite a marginalized figure who “was warning—to a largely indifferent economics profession—not just that something like that crisis could happen but that it would happen” (Krugman 2012: 42).


pages: 537 words: 144,318

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

The hysteria with Milton Friedman’s notion that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon places too little significance on the overleveraged nature of our society. It is of course orthodox thinking and it’s hard to say it’s wrong, but I believe it’s wrong. But this is the prevailing mood in investing today. Figure 13.8 Gold, 1979-1980 SOURCE: Bloomberg. Minsky Moment A Minsky moment is a term coined after American economist Hyman Minsky (1919-1996), whose work was primarily focused on understanding the phenomena around financial crises. Minsky held that in good times, investors begin to take on excessive leverage when cash flows begin to cover debt payments, leading to a debt spiral and ultimately a crash.

Could the dovish Bernanke produce a similar melt-up at the long end of the bond market? Does the Bernanke Fed understand the big picture in the way that the Volcker Fed did in the 1970s? The Fed understands the gravity of the present situation and is fearful of a debt deflation. However, if I were to be super critical, I would contend that they are tackling a Minsky moment (see box) through the lens of Milton Friedman and that they may convince themselves that the worst is behind us too soon. But then I would also argue that stock market gurus, the government, and the Central Bank of China certainly don’t get it either. Trichet doesn’t get it. Angela Merkel certainly doesn’t get it.

The point at which the debt-fueled speculation begins to come unraveled is the point at which no counterparty can be found to bid at the inflated asking prices prevailing in the market. This leads to a precipitous decline in prices and an evaporation of liquidity, as investors must sell even liquid securities in order to cover their debt payments. It is believed that the term “Minsky moment” was first employed by Paul McCulley of PIMCO in 1998, to describe the 1998 Russian financial crisis. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in 50 years time we look back on 2008 and the conventional wisdom becomes that the central banks should have done more? They should have printed more money and been more aggressive, yet they screwed up by taking baby steps because they were terrified of gold at $1,000, of the dollar collapsing, and of the Chinese pulling the money away.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

Adam Tooze, “Why Central Banks Need to Step Up on Global Warming,” Foreign Policy, Aug. 6, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/why-central-banks-need-to-step-up-on-global-warming/. 45. Tooze (2019). 46. “Florida’s Sea Level Is Rising,” Sea Level Rise, https://sealevelrise.org/states/florida/. 47. Akhilesh Ganti, “What Is a Minsky Moment?” Investopedia, July 30, 2019, www.investopedia.com/terms/m/minskymoment.asp; John Cassidy. “The Minsky Moment,” New Yorker, January 27, 2008, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/04/the-minsky-moment. 48. Christopher Flavelle, “Bank Regulators Present a Dire Warning of Financial Risks from Climate Change,” New York Times, Oct. 17, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/climate/federal-reserve-climate-financial-risk.html 49.

In April 2019 Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, and François Villeroy de Galhua, the governor of the Banque de France, issued a joint statement pointing out that insured losses from extreme weather events have risen five-fold in the last thirty years. They suggested that the financial markets faced the risk of a climate “Minsky moment”—a reference to the work of the economist Hyman Minsky, whose analysis was used to show how banks overreached themselves before the 2008 financial crisis, and warned that those companies and industries that failed to adjust to climate change might cease to exist.47 In October 2019, Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, wrote to Senator Brian Schatz, noting that climate change was being “considered as an increasingly relevant issue for the central bank.”


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Although he was no longer alive when the crisis came, he was rediscovered when it hit; many people believed that his ideas explained what happened better than conventional economics could. Second-hand copies of his books started selling for hundreds of pounds. The crisis got yet another name: ‘the Minsky moment’. In the 1980s, free-market economics had made a comeback. Economists believed that when left alone the economy was fairly stable, without wild accelerations and crashes. Minsky, on the other hand, thought that capitalism runs into crises. This made him a bit of a radical. His attitude might have had something to do with his upbringing: his parents were socialists, Russian-Jewish immigrants who had met at a party to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Karl Marx.

Lenders and borrowers were creating a self-fulfilling upwards spiral, what economists sometimes call a bubble. Minsky called the reckless system of lending ‘Ponzi finance’ after a famous Italian swindler named Charles Ponzi whose crooked schemes worked by creating bubbles that pulled in more and more gullible investors. The problem with bubbles is that they burst. Then comes the Minsky moment, when lenders get cold feet and start asking for their loans to be repaid. They stop lending to risky borrowers and house prices stop rising quite so quickly. That undermines the system of Ponzi finance, which depends on fast rises. People start selling houses, and prices fall. Borrowers find that they can’t make their repayments and the banks start to take possession of their homes.

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pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The point of inflection in this cycle, when lenders suddenly realize that they were dangerously overoptimistic in their lending decisions and their original assumptions about asset values, is often described as a Minsky Moment. A classic such moment occurred during the Russian government default and hedge fund crisis of 1998.5 According to many analysts, the 2007-09 credit crunch was a Minsky Moment writ large. George Soros’s Theory of Reflexivity can be seen as a generalization of Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis and Keynes’s theory of animal spirits. Soros puts both on a different philosophical basis by emphasising the two-way interaction between people’s perceptions and the events perceived.

The changed fundamentals then reinforce the initial expectations, creating self-perpetuating cycles that can push an economy, or indeed an entire society, further and further from a balanced state. Eventually, a point is reached when expectations become so extreme and unrealistic that the fundamentals can no longer be sufficiently manipulated by the process of reflexivity. At the point that Soros calls the Moment of Truth, which is identical in financial markets to the Minsky Moment, the self-reinforcing mechanism goes into reverse—and boom turns to bust. In his books and lectures, Soros has used reflexivity to analyze many extreme and unexpected events, including the collapse of communism and breakup of the Soviet Union. During the 2007-09 crisis, he persuasively argued that the purely financial boom-bust cycle was combined with a wider cycle in free-market ideology, starting in the late 1970s and culminating in the extreme deregulation of the precrisis phase.

Morgan Kahn, Richard Kahneman, Daniel Kaldor, Nicholas Kalecki, Michal Keynes/Keynesian economics “animal spirits,” biography of Keynes boom-bust cycles explanation Capitalism and Golden Age ideas/policies mathematics and See also Economics eras/second; Macroeconomics Khrushchev, Nikita King, Mervyn Knight, Frank Krugman, Paul Kuhn, Thomas Labor unions stagflation and unemployment and Lagarde, Christine Laissez-faire philosophy Lehman Brothers capitalism transition and saving scenario/effects Lehman Brothers collapse chain reaction from confidence collapse and effects GSE seizure and share price plunge Limits to growth/physical resources Lloyds Lockhart, James MacDonald, Ramsay Macroeconomics economics eras/second new classical school and recovery from financial crisis See also Capitalism 4.0/economic policy; Keynes/Keynesian economics Mad Max (movie) Mad Max Paradox Mahbubani, Kishore Mandela, Nelson Mandelbrot, Benoit Mark-to-market accounting/effects Market fundamentalism description economic recovery and failed states and financial crisis of 2007-09 and flaws/dangers of imaginary world of oil prices/shock (2008) and progressive taxation and term See also Economics eras/third; Monetarism; specific individuals; Thatcher-Reagan revolution Marris, Robin Marx, Karl on capitalism social problems and Masters, Michael Mathematics in economics normal distribution use oversimplification and “science” and McCarthy, Joe Meade, James Medicare/Medicaid, U.S. Megatrends overview summary Mellon, Andrew Merkel, Angela Merrill Lynch Mexican government bankruptcy Micawber, Mr./Principle Microeconomics Mill, John Stuart Minsky, Hyman Minsky Moment (Mis)behavior of Markets (Mandelbrot) Mises, Ludwig von Mississippi Company, Paris Mixed economy adaptability and energy policy example of future government-market relationship Monetarism demand management and description end of government role/inflation and outside U.S. See also Market fundamentalism; specific individuals; Thatcher-Reagan revolution Morgan, J.P.


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The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

The capitalist process in much the same way in which it destroyed the institutional framework of feudal society also undermines its own.”14 Schumpeter’s view is consistent with that of Nobel laureate Hyman Minsky, but not in the way you might think. Minsky, an American economist, theorized that long periods of financial stability naturally lead to instability because of the rise of debt. The “Minsky moment” is the tipping point where the debt-fuelled asset bubble collapses, assets become difficult to sell at any price, and a market collapse ensues. Interestingly, though, Minsky didn’t forecast a write-down in debt. Although Minsky, who passed away in 1996, is legendary for the Minsky moment, his most prominent call was something else. Minsky realized that even governments that preached free-market rules, when faced with a systematic collapse, would always act as the lender of last resort and bail out the market.


pages: 524 words: 143,993

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

People working for financial institutions are both the most expert and the most deeply invested in the solidity of the boom. Trees do not reach the sky. Ultimately, the bubble will expand no longer. When new buyers can no longer borrow, prices stop rising. From ceasing to rise to starting to fall takes but a moment: nobody wants to hold assets that nobody wants to buy. This is the ‘Minsky moment’, a term coined by Paul McCulley, formerly of the Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO). Once the supply of ‘greater fools’ has dried up, those who have borrowed in the expectation of further price rises will be forced to sell, the institutions who have financed them will to try to get their money back, and those who have lent to such institutions will also want their money back.

It is a macroeconomic process, moreover, not a microeconomic one: it shapes the entire economy. There could then be two further answers to the question: what stops credit expansion? One is that a crisis stops it. That is all too unpleasantly true: in the end the elastic credit system snaps back into a credit crisis: that is the ‘Minsky moment’, when panic sets in. A more pleasant answer is that the central bank stops credit expansion by raising interest rates. The implicit answer of the pre-crisis official orthodoxy was that central banks would stop the excess credit expansion in time, or at least not too late, by responding to rising inflation in the prices of goods and services.

In economic parlance, they are ‘endogenous’, not ‘exogenous’. 19. Hyman Minsky, ‘The Modeling of Financial Instability: An Introduction’, in Modeling and Simulation 5, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Pittsburgh Conference, 1974, Instrument Society of America, pp. 267–73. 20. John Cassidy, ‘The Minsky Moment’, The New Yorker, 4 February 2008, www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/02/04/080204taco_talk_cassidy. See also ‘Five Steps of a Bubble’, Investopedia, 2 June 2010, http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/10/5-steps-of-a-bubble.asp. 21. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929 (Boston and New York: Mariner, 1997) p. 133. 22.


pages: 367 words: 110,161

The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All by Mary Childs

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, break the buck, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, index card, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, skunkworks, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, yield curve

He was a disciple of Hyman Minsky, an economist who had preached in the 1960s through the ’80s that too much calm, too much stability, sows the seeds of instability. When the economy is booming, people forget the bad times and reach a little too far, borrow a little too much. McCulley nudged Gross as early as 2002 to read these then-deep-cut papers. The economy was approaching a “Minsky moment,” McCulley said, a tipping point into market chaos. At Pimco’s Investment Committee meetings—which could turn into a brawl at any moment, with Gross sometimes impassively overseeing the ruckus, other times actively leading the gang—McCulley bellowed about “the shadow banking system” in his drawling, backwoods accent.

A couple of weeks earlier, the cumulative value of those holdings had been €2.1 billion; now it was €1.59 billion. Or thereabouts. “The complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the U.S. securitization market has made it impossible to value certain assets fairly, regardless of their quality or credit rating,” BNP said. This was it. This was McCulley’s “Minsky moment,” when increasingly reckless risk taking culminates in the bursting of asset price bubbles. Market collapse. “I remember the day like my son’s birthday,” McCulley said later. “Game over.” After months of teetering, hoping the subprime problem wouldn’t spread, stock and bond markets began to swoon in earnest, together.

“At that point, ‘For Sale’”: “Pimco Exec Cites Fallout from Housing,” The Orange County Register, June 5, 2006. “stable disequilibrium”: Bill Gross, “Mission Impossible?” Investment Outlook, Pimco.com, May 16, 2006. “the shadow banking system”: Paul McCulley, “Teton Reflections,” Investment Outlook, Pimco.com, September 7, 2007. “Minsky moment”: Paul McCulley, “The Shadow Banking System and Hyman Minsky’s Economic Journey,” Pimco.com, May 26, 2007. “same old discussions”: Allianz, Letter to the Shareholders, Fiscal Year 2000. “Anonymity, not notoriety”: Bill Gross, “Miracu(less),” Investment Outlook, Pimco.com, August 1, 2001. “unresponsive mule”: Paul McCulley, “Time: Varying Variables Vary,” Investment Outlook, Pimco.com, October 19, 2006.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

Minsky was an American economist who described a process of growing confidence that leads people to take on more and more debt, until the only way it can be safely financed is if asset prices keep rising. At this point, it takes only a small shift in circumstances or attitudes for confidence to evaporate, investors to default, and fire sales of assets to start. That rapid crumbling of confidence is known as a Minsky moment. But the paper’s emphasis on the role of safety in explaining financial instability is what resonates most after the events of the past few years.7 The authors contend that episodes of financial creativity begin when investors want more of a certain type of product than the market can currently supply.

., 32 Keys, Benjamin, 48 Kharroubi, Enisse, 79 Kickstarter, 172 King, Stephen, 99 Klein, David, 182 Krugman, Paul, xv Lahoud, Sal, 166 Lang, Luke, 153, 161–162 Laplanche, Renaud, 179, 184, 188, 190, 193–194, 196–197 Latency, 53 Law of large numbers, 17 Layering, 57 Left-digit bias, 46 Lehman Brothers, x, 44, 65 Lending direct, 84 marketplace, 184 payday, 200 relationship-based, 11, 151, 206–208 secured, xiv, 76 unsecured, 206 See also Loans; Peer-to-peer lending Lending Club, 172, 179–180, 182–184, 187, 189, 194–195, 197 Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci), 19 Lerner, Josh, 59 Lethal pandemic, risk-modeling for demographic profile, 230 exceedance-probability curve, 231–232, 232 figure 3 historical data, 228–229 infectiousness and virulence, 229–230 location of outbreak, 230–231 Leverage, 51, 70–71, 80, 186, 188 Leverage ratio, 76–77 Lewis, Michael, 57 Liber Abaci or Book of Calculation (Fibonacci), 19 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 41 Liebman, Jeffrey, 98 Life expectancy government reaction to, 128–129 projections of, 124–127, 126 figure 2 ratio of young to older people, 127–128 Life-insurance policies, 142 Life-settlements industry, 142–143 Life table, 20 Limited liability, 212 Liquidity, 12–14, 39, 185–186 List, John, 109 The Little Book of Behavioral Investing (Montier), 156 Lo, Andrew, 113–115, 117–123 Loans low-documentation, 48–49 secured, 76 small business, 181, 216 student, 164, 166–167, 169–171, 182 syndicated, 41 Victory Loans, 28 See also Lending; Peer-to-Peer lending Logistic regression, 201 London, early fire insurance in, 16–17 London, Great Fire of, 16 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 41 Long-Term Capital Management, 123 Longevity, betting on, 143–144 Loss aversion, 136 Lotteries, 212, 213 Low-documentation loans, 48–49 Lumni, 165, 168, 175 Lustgarten, Anders, 111 Lynn, Jeff, 160–161 Mack, John, 180 Mahwah, New Jersey, 52, 53 Marginal borrowers assessment of, 216–217 behavioral finance and, 208–214 industrialization of credit, 206 microfinance and, 203 savings schemes, 209–214 small businesses, 215–219 unsecured lending to, 206 Wonga, 203, 205, 208 Marginal borrowers (continued) ZestFinance, 199, 202, 205–206 Maritime piracy, solutions to, 151–152 Maritime trade, role of in history of finance, 3, 7–8, 14, 17, 23 Market makers, 15–16, 55 MarketInvoice, 195, 207, 217–218 Marketplace lending, 184 Markowitz, Harry, 118 Massachusetts, use of inflation-protected bonds in, 26 Massachusetts, use of social-impact bonds in, 98 Matching engine, 52 Maturity transformation, 12–13, 187–188, 193 McKinsey & Company, ix, 42 Mercator Advisory Group, 203 Merrill, Charles, 28 Merrill, Douglas, 199, 201 Merrill Lynch, 28 Merton, Robert, 31, 113–114, 123–124, 129–132, 142, 145 Mian, Atif, 204 Michigan, University of, financial survey by, 134–135 Microfinance, 203 Micropayment model, 217 Microwave technology, 53 The Million Adventure, 213–214 Minsky, Hyman, 42 Minsky moment, 42 Mississippi scheme, 36 Mitchell, Justin, 166–167 Momentum Ignition, 57 Monaco, modeling risk of earthquake in, 227 Money, history of, 4–5 Money illusion, 73–74 Money laundering, 192 Money-market funds, 43, 44 Monkeys, Yale University study of loss aversion with, 136 Montier, James, 156–157 Moody, John, 24 Moody’s, 24, 235 Moore’s law, 114 Morgan Stanley, 188 Mortgage-backed securities, 49, 233 Mortgage credit by ZIP code, study of, 204 Mortgage debt, role of in 2007–2008 crisis, 69–70 Mortgage products, unsound, 36–37 Mortgage securitization, 47 Multisystemic therapy, 96 Munnell, Alicia, 129 Naked credit-default swaps, 143 Nature Biotechnology, on drug-development megafunds, 118 “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility” (Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny), 42 Network effects, 181 New York, skyscraper craze in, 74–75 New York City, prisoner-rehabilitation program in, 108 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 31, 52, 53, 61, 64 New York Times, Merrill Lynch ad in, 28 Noncorrelated assets, 122 Nonprofits, growth of in United States, 105–106 Northern Rock, x NYMEX, 60 NYSE Euronext, 52 NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), 31, 52, 53, 61, 64 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), 128, 147 Oldfield, Sean, 67–68, 80–84 OnDeck, 216–218 One Service, 94–95, 105, 112 Operating expense ratio, 188–189 Options, 15, 124 Order-to-trade ratios, 63 Oregon, interest in income-share agreements, 172, 176 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 128, 147 Overtrading, 24 Packard, Norman, 60 Pandit, Vikram, 184 Park, Sun Young, 233 Partnership mortgage, 81 Pasion, 11 Pave, 166–168, 173, 175, 182 Payday lending Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, survey on, 200 information on applicants, acquisition of, 202 underwriting of, 201 PayPal, 219 Peak child, 127 Peak risk, 228 Peer-to-peer lending advantages of, 187–189 auction system, 195 big investors in, 183 borrowers, assessment of, 197 in Britain, 181 commercial mortgages, 181 CommonBond, 182, 184, 197 consumer credit, 181 diversification, 196 explained, 180 Funding Circle, 181–182, 189, 197 investors in, 195 Lending Club, 179–180, 182–184, 187, 189, 194–195, 197 network effects, 181 ordinary savers and, 184 Prosper, 181, 187, 195 RateSetter, 181, 187, 196 Relendex, 181 risk management, 195–197 securitization, 183–184, 196 Peer-to-peer lending (continued) small business loans, 181 SoFi, 184 student loans, 182 Zopa, 181, 187, 188, 195 Pensions, cost of, 125–126 Perry, Rick, 142–143 Peterborough, England, social-impact bond pilot in, 90–92, 94–95, 104–105, 112 Petri, Tom, 172 Pharmaceuticals, decline of investment in, 114–115 Piracy Reporting Centre, International Maritime Bureau, 151 Polese, Kim, 210 Poor, Henry Varnum, 24 “Portfolio Selection” (Markowitz), 118 Prediction Company, 60–61 Preferred shares, 25 Prepaid cards, 203 Present value of cash flows, 19 Prime borrowers, 197 Prince, Chuck, 50–51, 62 Principal-agent problem, 8 Prisoner rehabilitation programs, 90–91, 94–95, 98, 108, 112 Private-equity firms, 69, 85, 91, 105, 107 Projection bias, 72–73 Property banking crises and, xiv, 69 banking mistakes involving, 75–80 behavioral biases and, 72–75 dangerous characteristics of, 70–72 fresh thinking, need for, xvii, 80 investors’ systematic errors in, 74–75 perception of as safe investment, 76, 80 Prosper, 181, 187, 195 Provisioning funds, 187 Put options, 9, 82 Quants, 19, 63, 113 QuickBooks, 218 Quote stuffing, 57 Raffray, André-François, 144 Railways, affect of on finance, 23–25 Randomized control trials (RCTs), 101 Raphoen, Christoffel, 15–16 Raphoen, Jan, 15–16 RateSetter, 181, 187, 196 RCTs (randomized control trials), 101 Ready for Zero, 210–211 Rectangularization, 125, 126 figure 2 Regulation NMS, 61 Reinhart, Carmen, 35 Reinsurance, 224 Relendex, 181 Rentes viagères, 20 Repurchase “repo” transactions, 15, 185 Research-backed obligations, 119 Reserve Primary Fund, 44 Retirement, funding for anchoring effect, 137–138 annuities, 139 auto-enrollment in pension schemes, 135 auto-escalation, 135–136 conventional funding, 127–128 decumulation, 138–139 government reaction to increased longevity, 128–129 home equity, 139–140 life expectancy, projections of, 124–127, 126 figure 2 life insurance policies, cash-surrender value of, 142 personal retirement savings, 128–129, 132–133 replacement rate, 125 reverse mortgage, 140–142 savings cues, experiment with, 137 SmartNest, 129–131 Reverse mortgages, 140–142 Risk-adjusted returns, 118 Risk appetite, 116 Risk assessment, 24, 45, 77–78, 208 Risk aversion, 116, 215 Risk-based capital, 77 Risk-based pricing model, 176 Risk management, 55, 117–118, 123, 195–197 Risk Management Solutions, 222 Risk sharing, 8, 82 Risk-transfer instrument, 226 Risk weights, 77–78 Rogoff, Kenneth, 35 “The Role of Government in Education” (Friedman), 165 Roman Empire business corporation in, 7 financial crisis in, 36 forerunners of banks in, 11 maritime insurance in, 8 Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), 209–210 Roulette wheel, use of in experiment on anchoring, 138 Royal Bank of Scotland, 186 Rubio, Marco, 172 Russia, mortgage market in, 67 S-curve, in diffusion of innovations, 45 Salmon, Felix, 155 Samurai bonds, 27 Satsuma Rebellion (1877), 27 Sauter, George, 58 Save to Win, 214 Savings-and-loan crisis in US (1990s), 30 Savings cues, experiment with, 137 Scared Straight social program, 101 Scholes, Myron, 31, 123–124 Science, Technology, and Industry Scoreboard of OECD, 147 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 54, 56, 57, 58, 64 Securities markets, 14 Securitization, xi, 20, 37–38, 117–122, 183–184, 196, 236 Seedrs, 160–161 Sellaband, 159 Shared equity, 80–84 Shared-equity mortgage, 84 Shepard, Chris, xii–xiii Shiller, Robert, xv–xvi, 242 Shleifer, Andrei, 42, 44 Short termism, 58 SIBs.


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Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Panic struck the markets, uncertainty spread, liquidity evaporated, and central banks around the world threw lifelines to banks large and small and to financial institutions of every stripe. It was a rescue effort on a scale that Bagehot never foresaw. For this crisis, although a textbook case, was bigger, swifter, and more brutal than anything seen before. It was a nineteenth-century panic moving at twenty-first-century speed. The Minsky Moment By the spring of 2006, the financial system, with its extraordinary reliance on leverage—and its blind faith that asset prices would only continue to rise—was primed for a breakdown of monumental proportions. Financing increasingly depended on the sort of speculative and Ponzi borrowing that Minsky predicted.

Faced with dwindling reserves, both the traditional and the shadow banks began to hoard cash, refusing to lend on the basis of collateral that looked more dubious by the day. A sudden aversion to risk, a sudden desire to dismantle the pyramids of leverage on which profits have until so recently depended, is the key turning point in a financial crisis. In earlier times, it was called “discredit” or “revulsion”; more recently it has been called a “Minsky moment.” By late spring of 2007, that moment had definitely arrived. The Unraveling Hedge funds may not look like banks, but they operate much as banks do, getting short-term investments from individual and institutional investors as well as short-term repurchase agreements, or repos, from investment banks.

leverage of banks borrowers and compensation and of corporations defined embedded in foreign countries of hedge funds of households of insurance companies of investment banks regulation of systemic or compound liar loans LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) LIBOR-OIS spread liquidity banks and central banks and investment banks and in money markets mortgages and liquidity crunch emerging economies and liquidity trap Lithuania living wills loans bridge corporate credit card foreign investment as home equity IMF Latin American debt crisis and liar LIBOR and l ong-term NINJA nonrecourse PPIP and short-term student subprime see also auto loans; collateralized loan obligations; mortgages lobbying activities local government fiscal policy and Lombard Street Lombard Street London London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) Luskin, David McCulley, Paul Mackay, Charles Madoff, Bernard Maiden Lane corporations Malaysia managers Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Kindleberger) manufacturing margin calls margin requirements markets efficiencies of failure of self-regulation of Markit Group mark-to-market accounting rules Marshall, Alfred Martin, William McChesney, Jr. Marx, Karl mathematical models MBSs Mellon, Andrew Mellon Bank Menger, Carl Merit Financial Merrill Lynch Mexico bailout of swap lines and mezzanine tranche Middle East see also specific countries migrant workers Mill, John Stuart Minsky, Hyman taxonomy of borrowers of Minsky moment Mises, Ludwig von Mississippi Company monetarism monetary policy aftermath of Austrian School’s view of deflation and easy fiscal policy blurred with fiscal policy compared with to frustrate bubbles Great Depression and Great Moderation and of Greenspan Keynesian view of liquidity trap and tight money easy government guarantees for printing of remittances of migrant workers money market funds Money Market Investor Funding Facility (MMIFF) money markets money supply contraction of monoline insurers Moody’s Investor Service moral hazard bailouts and contingent capital and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and guarantees and money loaned to banks and principal-agent problem and shareholders and Morgan, J.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The response of economists following the burst of the bubble was similarly weak, typically offering bland technical advice, such as improving information flows and extending regulation across financial institutions; for instance, see Randall Dodd, ‘Subprime: Tentacles of a Crisis’, Finance and Development, December 2007. Immediately after the financial meltdown, heterodox economics had its moment in the sun as several economists and others claimed that the crisis was a ‘Minsky moment’; see Charles Whalen, ‘The U.S. Credit Crunch of 2007: A Minsky Moment’, Levy Economics Institute Public Policy Brief No. 92, 2007; L. Randall Wray, ‘Lessons from the Subprime Meltdown’, Levy Economics InstituteWorking Paper No. 552, 2007; Wray, ‘Financial Markets Meltdown: What Can We Learn from Minsky?’, Levy Economics Institute Public Policy Brief No. 94, April 2008.

Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, New York: Bedminster Press, 1968. Weeks, John, ‘Surfing the Troubled Waters of ‘Global Turbulence’: A Comment’, Historical Materialism 5, Winter 1999, pp. 211–30. Weiss, Linda, ‘Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State’, New Left Review 225, 1997, pp. 3–27. Whalen, Charles, ‘The U.S. Credit Crunch of 2007: A Minsky Moment’, Public Policy Brief No. 92, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Levy Economics Institute, 2007. White, William R., ‘Is Price Stability Enough?’, Working Paper No. 205, Bank for International Settlements, 2006. White, William R., ‘Procyclicality in the Financial System: Do We Need a New Macro-financial Stabilisation Framework?’


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

When times are good, asset values are rising, and loan defaults are rare, it is all too easy to forget one of the laws of financial gravity: What goes up too fast usually comes crashing down. The late Hyman Minsky, an important but neglected economist, emphasized the forgetfulness factor in his theory of recurrent financial crises. In recent years, many Wall Streeters have taken to calling the 2007–2009 crisis a “Minsky moment.”* It was quite a moment. Too bad traders didn’t remember their Minsky before the debacle. Too bad regulators didn’t, either. THE EFFICIENT MARKETS HYPOTHESIS The adjective “efficient” in “efficient markets” refers to how investors use information. In an efficient market, every titbit of new information is processed correctly and immediately by investors.

See Foreclosures as house of cards, 84–87 housing sector crash, 16–19 initial events in (2006–2007), 90–94 investment bank failures. See Investment banks; specific banks by name job loss during. See Unemployment legacies of, 429–33 Lehman collapse, role of, 3–4, 19–21, 119, 168, 171 lessons for future, 433–42. See also Financial reform as liquidity versus credit-granting crisis, 93–94 as Minsky moment, 64 money market funds, runs from, 142–49 and Obama presidency. See Obama, Barack personal wealth, loss of, 6, 193, 354 and recession. See Great Recession (2007–2009) stock market losses, 114, 193, 256–57 U.S. economy, damage to, 5–6, 9–10, 171–73 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), 28, 112, 156, 288–89 Financial crisis precursors.

See also Morgan Stanley Maiden Lane, 107n Making Home Affordable, 334–37 Marketable debt, federal guarantee for, 161–62 Mayer, Chris, 326 Medicare/Medicaid, and federal budget deficit, 390, 398 Mellon, Andrew, 353 Meltzer, Allan, 349 Merrill Lynch Bank of America purchase of, 122, 129, 150, 152–53, 164–65 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 151–52 financial decline of, 151–52 leverage ratio of, 52 mortgage-related holdings, 89 Orange County derivatives failure, 60 post-collapse status, 52, 153 TARP funds for, 201 Mezzanine tranche, 74 Minsky, Hyman, 64, 434 Minsky moment, 64 Mishkin, Frederic “Rick,” 92, 105 Monetary policy recession, fighting with, 350 special tactics. See Unconventional monetary policy (UMP) Money market funds break the buck redemptions, 143–44 features of, 143–44 guarantees from Treasury, 145–47 no FDIC guarantees, 144 runs from (2008), 142–49 Monti, Mario, 424–25, 428 Moody’s, 400 rating failures, 79–81 Moral hazard and bailouts, 113–14, 125, 138–39 and European Central Bank (ECB), 423 meaning, financial scenario for, 108–9 past, learning from, 431–32 Washington Mutual lesson, 156–57 Morgan Stanley as bank holding company, 129, 154 as derivatives dealer, 61 financial decline of, 153–54 hedge fund run, 153 leverage ratio of, 52 PDCF loan to, 153–54 post-collapse reorganization, 52 TARP funds for, 201 Morgenson, Gretchen, 117 Mortgage-backed securities (MBS).


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

When the banking system fails, the veneer of stability cracks quickly, exposing economic and political fault-lines from which it takes a long time to recover. The essential lesson, though, is that financial crises happen because financial institutions create leverage, which, over time, is liable to become excessive and end up with what I called in 2007 a Minsky Moment. Named after the economist Hyman Minsky, this is the point where the highest state of leverage – when lenders are providing funds to borrowers in order to service and repay debt – leads to systemic financial instability.14 We know that the growth of domestic credit facilitated by banks and other financial institutions is central to financial crises.

‘China Banks Guru Warns of Bad Debt Reckoning’, Barrons, 15 August 2016. 12. IMF, ‘Global Financial Stability Report’, April 2016, pp. 16–18. 13. Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber, Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit, Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 4. 14. I heard the term Minsky Moment first in 1998 from a UBS colleague at the time, Paul McCulley, opining on the Asian crisis. 15. Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor, ‘Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles and Financial Crises 1870–2008’, American Economic Review, vol. 10, no. 22, April 2012, pp. 1029–61. 16.


pages: 318 words: 99,524

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis by Kevin Rodgers

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, diversification, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, latency arbitrage, law of one price, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Minsky moment, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, Y2K, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

One of their inspirations for this view is the work of a maverick American economist, Professor Hyman Minsky (1919–96), whose ‘financial instability hypothesis’, built on the work of Keynes, states the heretical notion that modern economies financed by a modern banking system will inevitably experience bubbles and crashes without needing an external (‘exogenous’) shock.7 Over a protracted period of ‘good times’, he asserts, capitalist economies naturally move from stability into a regime of speculative, ‘Ponzi’, pyramid scheme finance that eventually collapses in on itself in a ‘Minsky moment’. Although he never lived to see it, the credit implosion of 2008 is the exemplar of such a collapse. Central to his argument is that bankers ‘are merchants of debt who strive to innovate in the assets they acquire and the liabilities they market’ [my emphasis], thus increasing the stock of ‘money’ for speculation.8 The process of innovation is continuous.

This is a trick requiring such computational intensity that it would have seemed almost magical as little as five years ago. The same rapid improvement is happening in corporate computing.) A flood of new recruits would have arrived – no doubt in the most complex areas. Leverage, driven by competition, would, I’m sure, have been taken to the limit again. Where the eventual trigger for the next Minsky moment would have occurred, and how many years it would have taken to get to it, is a matter of pure speculation. Would it have been another property-related crash? It is tempting to think so, since property is a gigantically important asset class. If you are lucky enough to have accumulated any wealth in your lifetime it is likely that a large part of it is stored in the value of your home: the total market value of housing in the US in 2014 was around $22–4 trillion, the same order of magnitude as the value of all privately held paper financial assets, or approximately 150 per cent of GDP.30 Ratios are higher in other countries, such as the UK.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

“At a time when many economists were coming to believe in the efficiency of markets,” the Journal’s Justin Lahart noted, “Mr. Minsky was considered somewhat of a radical.” Now, however, many Wall Street economists and at least one former governor of the Fed were eagerly poring over his articles and books, most of which were out of print. “We are in the midst of a Minsky moment, bordering on a Minsky meltdown,” Paul McCulley, a managing director at Pacific Investment Management Company, the world’s biggest manager of bond mutual funds, told Lahart. Minsky was born in Chicago on September 23, 1919. He came from a left-wing background: his mother was a trade union activist and his father a member of the Socialist Party.

At some point, lenders get nervous about all the dubious credit they have already extended. This prompts them to call in some existing loans and restrict the issuance of new ones. Where money was flowing freely, it is suddenly much harder to obtain, even for financially sound creditors. This is a “Minsky moment” of the type that Paul McCulley and other Wall Street economists identified in August 2007. Struggling to meet their financial commitments, some shaky borrowers are forced to sell off whatever assets they can liquidate. “This,” Minsky noted drily, “is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values,” which, in turn, can lead to “a spiral of declining investment, declining profits, and declining asset prices.”


pages: 204 words: 53,261

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

Muller, “Capitalism and Inequality: What the Right and the Left Get Wrong,” Foreign Affairs (March–April 2013), pp. 30–51. 21. Hyman P. Minsky, “Uncertainty and the Institutional Structure of Capitalist Economies,” Journal of Economic Issues 30, no. 2 (June 1996), pp. 357–68; Levy Economics Institute, Beyond the Minsky Moment (e-book, April 2012); Alfred Rappaport, Saving Capitalism from Short-Termism (New York, 2011). 22. On the propensity for short-termism of publicly traded companies, see John Asker, Joan Farre-Mensa, and Alexander Ljungqvist, “Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle?” Review of Financial Studies 28, no. 2 (2015), pp. 342–90. 23. http://www.businessinsider.com/blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-letter-to-sp-500-ceos-2016–2. 24.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Values played no role in what happened.”29 Children of Privilege The economist Hyman Minsky theorized that in the early stages of a business cycle money is only available to creditworthy borrowers, known ironically as hedge finance. As the cycle develops, financial conditions look rosy and competing lenders extend money to marginal borrowers, a phase known as speculative finance and ultimately Ponzi finance. The cycle ends in a Minsky moment when the supply of money slows or shuts off. Borrowers unable to meet financial obligations try to sell assets, leading to a collapse in prices that triggers a spiral of economic decline. Hedge funds are Minsky machines. They borrow to purchase assets, a strategy that works in moderation. Increased borrowing to buy assets artificially boosts asset values, generating profits that allow further leverage until the supply of money ceases.

., 121, 130, 248 Metallgesellschaft, 56 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 155 Metromedia, 149 Metromedia Broadcasting Corporation, 149 Metropolitan Club, 304 Meyer, Phillipe, 141 mezzanine “mezz” debt, 154 notes, 170-171 Mickey Mouse, 324 microeconomics, definition of, 102 middle class for blue-collar workers, 42 Middle East, 264 petro-dollars, 82 Mikado, The, 128 Milgram, Stanley, 335 military industrial complex, 294 Milken, Michael, 141, 144-150, 152, 168, 244 1987 equity crash, 153 Milken’s mobsters, 146-147 purchases of, 322 Mill, John Stuart, 126, 305 Millennium Challenge, 264-265 Miller, Bill, 245, 360 Miller, Daniel, 130 Miller, Merton, 116, 119, 248 Mills, Susan, 299 Milton, John, 359 Minibonds, 220 Minogue, Kylie, 157 Minsky machines, 261. See also hedge funds Minsky moments, 261 Minsky, Hyman, 260-262 minutes to midnight, 34 Mirrored Room, The, 36, 64, 238 Mishkin, Frederic, 316 Mississippi Company, 28, 275 MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey), 91 Mitchell, Andrea, 299 mobile phone airtime credits, 24 Mobile, Alabama, 55 models risk, 246 securitization, 177 Modern Corporation and Private Property, The, 54 modern portfolio theory (Markowitz), 117 Modigliani, Franco, 119 Modigliani-Miller propositions, 119-120 Mohamme, Mahathir, 328 Molden, Mike, 184 momentum, 242 monetization, 38 money circulation of, 32 cultures, 20 exchanges, 23-24 gold.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

As the tenth anniversary of the stimulus approached, the departing Governor of the People’s Bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, warned of ‘hidden, complex, sudden, contagious and hazardous’ risks in China’s credit system.115 The Governor pointed to Ponzi lending schemes operated by internet companies.fn13 (A few months earlier, the collapse of a peer-to-peer lending scheme had prompted large public protests in Beijing’s financial district.116) He also warned of financial risks from zombie companies, poor risk models, speculative bubbles and financial innovation. The country’s top banker feared that China faced its own ‘Minsky moment’.117 Not long after, the government seized control of Baoshang Bank, a regional lender based in Baotou, Inner Mongolia. Baoshang had grown rapidly by issuing negotiable certificates of deposit to other banks. Its controlling shareholder had reportedly misused these funds. Zhou’s People’s Bank turned out to have been an unwitting accomplice.

, China Financial Markets, 20 September 2021. 115. Bloomberg News, ‘China’s Central Bank Chief Warns of “sudden, contagious and hazardous” Financial Risks’, Bloomberg, 4 November 2017. 116. Wright and Rosen, ‘Credit and Credibility’, p. 95. 117. Elias Glenn and Kevin Yao, ‘China Central Bank Warns against “Minsky Moment” Due to Excessive Optimism’, Reuters, 18 October 2017. 118. Wright and Rosen, ‘Credit and Credibility’. Baoshan Bank finally closed its doors in the summer of 2020 – the first Chinese bank failure since the collapse of Shantou Commercial Bank in 2001. 119. Estimate from Global Financial Integrity.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

“But probably underbaked until something happens that leads the market to agree. Let’s start small, it’s good value, but who knows when or if the market will come around to it.” The Rabbi keeps going. “You know, the real tail event will be a massive credit event or something that hits consumers, maybe a big bank or some other big GSE in China. That would be the Minsky moment.” We are in the middle of the discussion when I get a text from my sister. An old friend died. He was a guy I lost touch with, a cop when I met him. One of the top three fun people I’ve ever met, and a blue-collar guy through and through. We had some wild-ass nights. He was the self-proclaimed Asian sensation.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

We’re All Minskyites Now R O B E R T P O L L I N November 17, 2008 As the most severe financial crisis since the 1930s Depression has unfolded over the past eighteen months, the ideas of the late economist Hyman Minsky have suddenly come into fashion. In the summer of 2007, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article describing the emerging crisis as the financial market’s “Minsky moment.” His ideas have since been featured in the Financial Times, BusinessWeek and the New Yorker, among many other outlets. Minsky, who spent most of his academic career at Washington University in St. Louis and remained professionally active until his death in 1996, deserves the recognition. He was his generation’s most insightful analyst of financial markets and the causes of financial crises.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Finally, lenders finance borrowers whose income will cover neither the principal nor interest repayments, relying on increasing asset values to service the debt, a phase known as Ponzi finance. The cycle ends when the supply of money slows or stops. Borrowers unable to meet financial obligations try to sell assets, leading to a collapse in prices that triggers a financial and economic crisis. The GFC was such a Minsky moment. With debt and savings being two sides of the same coin, when the liabilities cannot be repaid, the phantom assets become worthless. The system collapses. The second factor in the events of 2008 was a large global imbalance in consumption, investment, and savings. Some countries overconsumed or overinvested relative to income, running up large foreign debts.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

However, his theories were highly applicable to the financial crisis of 2007–8, when a long period of apparent stability (the ‘Great Moderation’) and rising asset prices led to increasingly risky behaviour by households and banks in borrowing and lending against land and housing. Indeed, the crisis was termed a ‘Minsky moment’ because his work seemed to describe so well pre- and post-crisis dynamics (Minsky was largely ignored prior to the crisis). Economists increasingly now make use of his theories in relation to housing markets, for example describing ‘Minskyian households’ (Stockhammer and Wildauer, 2016, p. 2) as those which take confidence from increasing house prices to leverage up against their real estate assets to boost their consumption, resulting in increases in household debt-to-income ratios and financial fragility (see for example Dymski, 2010; Ryoo, 2015).


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

See Bernanke and James, The Gold Standard, Deflation, and Financial Crisis. 15. P. Krugman, End This Depression Now! (Norton, New York, 2012). 16. See J. Yellen, ‘A Minsky Meltdown: Lessons for Central Bankers’, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, Washington, DC, Apr. 2009. Named after Hyman Minsky, a Minsky moment is a situation where, in an over-indebted economy, people are forced to sell good assets to meet the obligations to their creditors, leading to a financial meltdown and a huge increase in the demand for cash. 17. J. M. Keynes, How to Pay for the War: A Radical Plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Macmillan, London, 1940). 18.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

As John Maynard Keynes, Charles Kindleberger, and many, many other economists, such as Hyman Minsky, had shown, financial excesses were built into the modern economy. Economists might have different ways of explaining the boom-and-bust cycle, but it is inevitable: what goes up must come down. This was no secret on Wall Street. The term Minsky moment was coined by an investment banker for the turning point that kicks off a panic in which investors begin dumping even high-quality assets in order to cover their debts. In September 2007, as the mortgage market was cracking, the Brookings Institution brought together Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Ronald Steel (George W.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The real economy that produces goods and services is poised to boom for a while, fed by debt arising from low interest rates, ample credit, and enormous economic stimulus by governments. The party will go on until reckless speculation becomes unsustainable, ending with the inevitable collapse in bullish sentiment, a phenomenon called a Minsky moment, named for economist Hyman Minsky. It’s what happens when market watchers suddenly begin to wake up and worry about irrational exuberance. Once their sentiment changes, a crash is inevitable as an asset and credit bubble and boom goes into a bust. Booms and bubbles always precede busts and crashes, but the scale this time far exceeds all precursors.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

The difficulties of replacing trades of a bankrupt counterparty when notional amounts are in the tens of trillions of dollars, represented by thousands of contracts covering underlying instruments in stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies, spread across the books of scores of subsidiaries and special purpose entities in multitudinous markets around the world, are extraordinary. This is why select banks are too big to fail. A single point of failure collapses the entire system. A crack-up has names like “Tipping Point,” “Black Swan,” and “Minsky Moment” given by sociologists, economists, and media. Those concepts, colorful as they may be, are not science. The dynamics of ruin are best understood using complexity theory, a hard science that offers tools to see collapse coming in advance. The term “complexity” is often used loosely as synonymous with complication or connectedness.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Money (debt) expanded to gratify the desire of consumers and businesses for greater economic activity (more trade). But some of that money was used to buy assets, in the form of shares and houses, which rose rapidly in price. Banks did what they always do: borrow short term to lend long term against the security of property. And as has happened regularly through history, they went too far. The ‘Minsky moment’ then happened and the spiral went into reverse. Or to put it another way, the pyramid scheme ran out of new clients. Given that the crisis took forty years to build, it is not surprising that forecasters were taken aback by the timing. The economist Tim Congdon wrote a book called The Debt Threat1 at the end of the 1980s; another economist, Peter Warburton, wrote Debt and Delusion at the end of the 1990s.2 The failure of the crisis to arrive at those points made it possible for optimists to argue that higher debt levels were just a sign of a more sophisticated economy and financial system.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

University of Chicago, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, vol. 21, no. 4, 2009; Siegel, “Efficient Market Theory and the Crisis”; Roger Lowenstein, “Book Review: The Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox,” Washington Post, June 7, 2009, accessed September 13, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2009/06/05/AR2009060502053.html. 228 “black swans”: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007). 228 By excluding uncertainty: Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (New York: Sentry Press, 1921). 229 In the 1960s and 1970s, as EMT: John Cassidy, “The Minsky Moment,” New Yorker, February 4, 2008, accessed September 13, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/ 02/04/080204taco_talk_cassidy. 229 Charles Kindleberger’s: Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1978). 229 British journalist and essayist: Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street (New York: Scribner, 1873). 229 And who hasn’t heard: Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, with a foreword by Andrew Tobias (1841; New York: Harmony Books, 1980). 230 The belief in the efficient market: Professors Roger Martin and Ben Lee pointed out the linkage between CEO pay, profits, and stock market performance to me; Michael Jensen and William Meckling, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure,” Journal of Financial Economics, October 1976, vol. 3, no. 4, 305–60, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=94043. 230 In their work, including a paper: Ibid. 230 Roberto Goizueta: “Coke CEO Roberto C.


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

As such, Ireland’s net income from foreign sources and its foreign obligations are outsized relative to other countries and its services exports are overstated. 28. Stephen Kinsella and Kevin O’Sullivan, “An Institutional Architecture for Meta-Risk Regulation in Irish Banking: Lessons from Anglo-Irish Banks Minsky Moment,” forthcoming in Journal of Banking Regulation (2013), 6. 29. Ibid., 5. 30. Kinsella, “Is Ireland Really?” 224. 31. John Mauldin, Endgame: The End of the Debt Supercycle and How It Changes Everything (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 223. 32. Francisco Carballo-Cruz, “Causes and Consequences of the Spanish Economic Crisis: Why the Recovery Is Taken So Long?


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

In Minsky’s own words, ‘The tendency to transform doing well into a speculative investment boom is the basic instability in a capitalist economy.’28 When prices eventually don’t keep pace with expectations, as will inevitably happen, mortgage defaults kick in, assets fall further in value, and – in what has been dubbed a ‘Minsky moment’ – finance goes off the cliff of insolvency, bringing on a crash. Guess what happens post-crash? Confidence gradually rebuilds and the process begins all over again in a rolling cycle of dynamic disequilibrium. There’s still a lot to learn from the chicken that crossed the road. In 2008 the fallout from this inherent market instability was compounded by the financial regulators’ failure to understand the inherent dynamics of banking networks.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

If ‘the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done'.25 The US economist Hyman Minsky, who was much influenced by Keynes, wrote extensively about the self-destabilizing dynamics of finance. In his work on financial instability26 he nested Keynes's critique within an alternative theory of money. This theory, which began far from the mainstream but forced its way in when a bubble-bursting ‘Minsky moment' broke the long boom in 2008, holds that the quantity of money in an economy is created by the interplay of economic forces rather than by an outside agency such as a country's central bank. Although portrayed as all-powerful (and so responsible for all financial instability) by Milton Friedman and the ‘monetarists' propelled to prominence by 1970s stagnation, central banks such as the US Federal Reserve can only indirectly and weakly control the private-sector banks and their money creation, by setting the base interest rate.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

One Austrian School acolyte, Kurt Richebächer, had predicted just that unhappy fate for the U.S. housing bubble several years before his death during the summer of 2007. Hyman Minsky (1919-96), part Keynesian, part disciple of Joseph Schumpeter, became so well known for preaching the financial system’s vulnerability to speculation and risk that admirers labeled the August panic a “Minsky Moment.” Certainly the Austrian-Minsky fusion, so specific in its finger pointing, will rise or fall on the economic outcome of the next several years. Parallel inflections have been suggested for energy: the insistence that fossil-fuel history has also had dramatic break points that prompted government, commerce, and society to redirect how energy was used and to recast the global structure of its production and consumption.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

,” CEPR, August 2002; and “The Housing Bubble and the Financial Crisis,” Real-World Economics Review, no. 46, March 20, 2008. 17. Others who warned about the economic crisis were Gary Shilling (“End of the Bubble Bailouts,” Forbes, August 29, 2006), an economic consultant and Forbes columnist, and George Magnus (“What This Minsky Moment Means,” FT, August 22, 2007), senior economic advisor to UBS. 18. Many who questioned the sustainability of the price rise noted that when increases in demand bring about a rise in the price of real estate, the consequent increase in supply dampens and reverses price increases. Only factors that are fixed in supply, such as scarce land, will experience a sustained increase in prices if demand permanently rises.