BREAKDOWN: 'Minsky Moments' and the Financial History of Pandemics

As a wobbly recovery tries to take hold, was the coronavirus pandemic simply the pinprick on a larger economic bubble?

May 19, 2020

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ABOUT

This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund.

Jamie Catherwood works at O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, a quantitative long-equity investment firm. More importantly, however, he is the finance history guy on Twitter. His “Financial History: Sunday Reads” curation pieces and longer form articles on his site Investor Amnesia have become required reading for anyone who wants the historical context for current financial issues.

On this episode of The Breakdown, Jamie and NLW discuss:

Financial lessons from previous pandemics, including the 14th century bubonic plague; an 1892 Cholera outbreak in Hamburg, Germany; and, of course, 1918
Strange parallels between 1918’s Spanish flu and the current Coronavirus crisis, including an increase in the price of oranges
The concept of “Minsky Moments,” a key inflection point in bubbles where over-exuberant markets become unwound extremely quickly

HOST

CoinDesk

CoinDesk is the world leader in news, prices and information on bitcoin and other digital currencies.

We cover news and analysis on the trends, price movements, technologies, companies and people in the bitcoin and digital currency world.