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]...

A dozen years ago, Randall Kroszner, soon to be one of George W. Bush's economic advisors and a Governor of the Federal Reserve, could comment in a Levy Institute seminar, without fear of contradiction, that there was no evidence to back the “public interest rationale” for the separation of...