Hyman Philip Minsky (September 23, 1919 – October 24, 1996) was an American economist, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis. He was born in Chicago, Illinois.
Minsky gave an explanation of financial crises, caused by swings in a potentially fragile financial system. Minsky is sometimes described as a post-Keynesian economist because, like Keynes, he supported some government intervention in financial markets. He opposed some of the financial deregulation policies popular in the 1980s. He supported the Federal Reserve as a "lender of last resort" (which means he thought it right for the Fed to bail out banks which might go bust). He argued against too much private debt in the financial markets.