The Federal Reserve's response to the current financial crisis has been praised because it introduced a zero interest rate policy more rapidly than the Bank of Japan (during the Japanese crisis of the 1990s) and embraced massive "quantitative easing". However, despite vast capital injections,...

In this brief, Senior Scholar Jan Kregel reviews Hyman P. Minsky's concept of financial fragility - in short, that the structure of a capitalist economy becomes more fragile over a period of prosperity - and concludes that the current crisis is in fact the result of insufficient margins of...