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Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
MINSKY My wife and I were talking this evening about this strange gift I seem to have for seeing the things in the media that turn into actual news stories. I get most of my news from the Internet, but it sometimes seems that, if I turn the TV on for five minutes, I'll see the clip that everyone repeats for the next couple of days. If I flip though a random magazine on the john, I'll happen to read the article that everyone talks about for the next little while. I don't mean to overstate this, but it happens often enough that we have remarked on it. It's not because I'm smart or handsome or anything. I wrote a tiny little report on here in November about a book I had been reading: Manias, Panics, and Crashes, A History of Financial Crises, by Charles P. Kindleberger. One of the first chapters discusses the so-called "Minsky Cycle" (or something like that), named after economist Hyman Minsky. In brief, it's the life cycle of an asset bubble. Like the one that's bursting now. But y'all, I had never heard of this guy before that. So I read this book, and understood some portion of it, back in the spring. (I ordered it from Amazon in December 2006!) Since then, I have run across a big pile of articles and blog posts with titles like "Are we at the peak of the Minsky credit cycle?" or "A 'Minsky Moment'", and the like. Just today, I open the latest New Yorker, and the first talk of the Town feature is titled, "The Minsky Moment." (And y'all, everyone seems to focus on the moment when the bubble bursts, but here's a clue: the important moment comes well before, when we enter the "euphoria" stage. That's when the people who control the banking apparatus decide whether or not to open the spigot to all these speculators who have no business borrowing these small fortunes to invest in whatever the overspriced asset du jour is. But nobody cares about that.) And all this from a book I read because Kevin Drum said he liked it. Like I said, I don't want to make more out of this than it really is. But damn if it isn't kind of spooky. Oh, and really effing bad news for the economy. But who cares about that? Comments by: YACCS |