Hyman Minsky, an American economist who died in 1996, said that the financial cycle led to economic volatility.

ECONOMIST: Buttonwood

The feedback mechanism described by Hyman Minsky, an American economist, seems pretty clear.

ECONOMIST: Buttonwood

Hyman Minsky developed a theory of financial instability in the 1970s.

ECONOMIST: A must-read on the origins of the crisis

Hyman Minsky, an American economist who has become more fashionable since his death in 1996, argued that these debt crises were both inherent in the capitalist system and cyclical.

ECONOMIST: Repent at leisure | The

It dates back to Keynes, one of the few economists whose reputation has been burnished by the crisis. (Another is Hyman Minsky, whose main insight was that stability leads to too much debt, and then to collapse.) Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst, said Mr Krugman.

ECONOMIST: Paul Krugman's London lectures