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 Asian crisis is a textbook case of the "financial instability hypothesis" first expressed in 1966 by the late Hyman Minsky. It began with what Minsky described as "the economics of euphoria:...The confident expectation of a steady stream of prosperity gross profits [produces a]...