A year and a half after the collapse in the financial markets, the debate about necessary "reforms" is still in its early stages, and none of the debaters seriously claims that his solution will in fact prevent a new crisis. The problem is that the proposed remedies deal with superficial matters...

The Asian crisis is a textbook case of the "financial instability hypothesis" first expressed in 1966 by the late Hyman Minsky. Minsky's "hypothesis" was proposed to explain instability in a large, insulated, developed economy. Despite its intuitive appeal, it was not widely accepted among...

Five times in a decade not yet completed, financial markets have floated to the edge of a whirlpool; in October 1998 they were about to drown when Alan Greenspan threw them a piece of string that, surprisingly, turned out to be a lifeline. The causes for this financial instability lie deep--in...

The causes for the instability that has marked the financial system over past decade lie deep-in the economic theory that urges easy and efficient substitution of one piece of paper for another, in the technology-driven tight articulation of receipts and payments, and in the growth of leverage...

Asia presents a cumulation of apparently rational decisions that produced disastrous results- a textbook illustration of "financial instability" developing from the economics of euphoria. A combination of factors produced the crisis as enormous capital inflows were drawn to the "Asian...