Hyman Minsky | |
---|---|
Born |
Hyman Philip Minsky September 23, 1919 Chicago, Illinois |
Died | October 24, 1996 Rhinebeck, New York |
(aged 77)
Nationality | United States |
Field | Macroeconomics |
School or tradition |
Post-Keynesian economics |
Alma mater |
University of Chicago (B.S.) Harvard University (M.P.A./Ph.D.) |
Influences |
Henry Simons Joseph Schumpeter Wassily Leontief Michał Kalecki John Maynard Keynes Irving Fisher Abba Lerner |
Influenced |
Laurence Meyer Paul McCulley Steve Keen Stephany Griffith-Jones Paul Krugman Daniele Archibugi Lars Pålsson Syll L. Randall Wray Ha-Joon Chang |
Contributions |
Financial instability hypothesis Minsky moment |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
Hyman Philip Minsky (September 23, 1919 – October 24, 1996) was an American economist, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis, and a distinguished scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His research attempted to provide an understanding and explanation of the characteristics of financial crises, which he attributed to swings in a potentially fragile financial system. Minsky is sometimes described as a post-Keynesian economist because, in the Keynesian tradition, he supported some government intervention in financial markets, opposed some of the financial deregulation policies popular in the 1980s, stressed the importance of the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort and argued against the over-accumulation of private debt in the financial markets.
Minsky's economic theories were largely ignored for decades, until the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 caused a renewed interest in them.
A native of Chicago, Illinois, Minsky was born into a family of Menshevik emigrants from Belarus. His mother, Dora Zakon, was active in the nascent trade union movement. His father, Sam Minsky, was active in the Jewish section of the Socialist party of Chicago. In 1937, Minsky graduated from George Washington High School in New York City. In 1941, Minsky received his B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and went on to earn an M.P.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where he studied under Joseph Schumpeter and Wassily Leontief.