The peak of the 2020 to 2021 speculative cycle will be studied in future editions of Kindleberger the way the South Sea Bubble and the dot-com peak are studied in current ones: as a unusually well-documented case of euphoria, where the evidence of excess is preserved in SPAC prospectuses, venture term sheets, crypto white papers, and the social media commentary of the participants in real time. What made 2021 unusual, even by the standards of speculative manias, was the simultaneity of the...

Charles Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes, first published in 1978 and updated through five editions, is the most useful book ever written about financial bubbles — not because it provides a predictive model but because it provides a diagnostic one. Kindleberger, drawing on Minsky's theoretical framework and his own deep knowledge of financial history, described the anatomy of a speculative mania with enough precision that subsequent bubbles can be mapped onto his schema with...

Hyman Minsky spent most of his career at Washington University in St. Louis largely ignored by mainstream economics, which had concluded — with the confidence that precedes most large intellectual mistakes — that financial markets were self-stabilizing and that the business cycle had been tamed. Minsky argued the opposite: that financial stability is itself destabilizing, that the longer a period of economic calm persists the more fragile the financial system becomes, and that the mechanism...