Florent His, 2025-26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar

During the global financial crisis of 2008, his name suddenly appeared everywhere, including the New Yorker, in a column titled “The Minsky Moment,” the Minsky moment being the term coined in 1998, so AI tells me, to refer to “a sudden, catastrophic collapse of asset values marking the end of a prolonged, debt-fueled market boom.”

The namesake of the catastrophic moment is the Chicago-born, wavy-haired economist Hyman Minsky (1919–96), and he is the subject of the current work of Florent His, a 2025–26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar.

“Minsky went from being this fairly mainstream economist who did a PhD at Harvard in the 1940s to becoming, by the 1960s, a fully fledged Post Keynesian”—an economist who believes that effective demand largely determines economic performance—“who tried again and again to convince other economists to take financial instability seriously,” says Florent, who completed a PhD in 2025 in economics at the University of Paris 1 with a dissertation on Minsky. 

The hard-headedness that Minsky ran into, argues Florent, shaped his way of being a Post Keynesian economist.

“Most economists believed that the economic system would never become unstable because prices would adjust to changes in supply and demand,” says Florent, a native of Normandy. 

“What Minsky argued was that the very price changes that were supposed to save the system actually brought about the instability they meant to ward off.”

That idea became known as the financial instability hypothesis.

“In short, instability was not a bug of the economy but a feature.”

Why did Minsky’s fellow economists more or less ignore the threat of financial instability?

According to Florent, Minsky—who spent most of his career at Washington University in St. Louis and whose parents were trade unionists and socialists—blamed the reigning general equilibrium theory, which held that the innumerable markets that make up the whole economy interact in such a way as to balance the entire system of supply and demand. 

While at Duke, Florent has been interrogating the standard narrative about financial stability among macroeconomic historians. The narrative claims that financial instability was largely ignored (except by people like Minsky) until the 2008 financial crisis. 

Yet as Florent has discovered, in the 1970s and 1980s a company named Data Resources Inc., led by Otto Eckstein, who was President Lyndon Johnson’s economic adviser, built what was then the largest macro model of the US economy—a model that actually took into account financial instability. 

“The model, however, went unnoticed by most economists, as the publications of Data Resources never found their way into the professional journals.”

One of those unnoticing economists was Ben Bernanke, the former chair of the Federal Reserve.

“When Bernanke received his Nobel Prize, he stated that Keynesian economists had had no theory of financial instability before him. My research shows that that was simply not the case.”

The archives of Data Resources are at the Library of Congress, which Florent plans to visit later this year.

He is also looking through the papers of Robert Solow, in the Rubenstein Library, for any communication Solow might have had with one of the founders of Data Resources, Otto Eckstein, who was at Harvard while Solow was at MIT.

A fan of David Lynch and Pedro Almodóvar, Florent is reading Moby Dick in a French translation. 

“Appelez-moi Ishmaël.”

Florent will be at Duke until April.