'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?

By Nathaniel Whittemore

May 19, 2020 at 7:21 p.m. UTC

Updated Dec 11, 2022 at 7:30 p.m. UTC

Breakdown 5.19-5 — Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com

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Nathaniel Whittemore

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

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This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fundhttps://grayscale.co/coindesk.

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

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Nathaniel Whittemore

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Nathaniel Whittemore