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...