Semper Augustus tulip, 17th century watercolour. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Palgrave Macmillan
Manias, Panics, and Crashes
A history of financial crises.
$40.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Charles P. Kindleberger; Robert Z. Aliber
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Published
- January 2023
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
The Crash Is a Recurring Character
Charles Kindleberger, economic historian at MIT, published this study in 1978 as a natural history of financial crisis, and its unnerving quality is how little the story changes. Credit expands, asset prices detach from earnings, the shrewd sell to the hopeful, some small event turns confidence, and the rush for the exit begins; only the asset varies, tulips, canal shares, land, stocks, houses.
Kindleberger built on Hyman Minsky's model of credit cycles and wrote with a dry wit rare in the subject. Robert Aliber carried the book forward after Kindleberger's death, and the eighth edition of 2023 brings the case list up through the crises its earlier editions predicted in outline. It remains the standard field guide, reissued, appropriately, after every panic.
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