Manias, Panics, and Crashes

Robert Z. Aliber is Professor Emeritus of International Economics and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, USA. He was director of the Center for Studies in International Finance; on the research staff for the Committee for Economic Development and Commission on Money and Credit; and senior economic advisor for the Agency for International Development, U.S. Department of State. Aliber has consulted to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and to other U.S. government agencies, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, testified before committees of the Congress, and lectured extensively in the United States and abroad.

The late Charles P. Kindleberger was the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT for 33 years and author of over 30 books. He was best known as a financial historian, whom the Economist r eferred to as 'the master of the genre' on financial crisis. Headvanced the study of international finance and helped to devise the Marshall Plan, approved by Congress, for Europe's reconstruction after World War II. During his tenure at MIT, Kindleberger was a consultant to the federal government several times, most often for the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. In 1985, he was president of the American Economic Association.

Robert N. McCauley is a wide-ranging economist with particular expertise in international financial markets and the global domain of the dollar. His central banking career spanned 38 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), including three years as head of the BIS Asian Office in Hong Kong SAR. In 1999, he co-authored Dodging Bullets: Changing U.S. Corporate Capital Structures in the 1980s and 1990s, an application of the Minsky-Kindleberger model to the corporate leveraging mania. He is currently nonresident senior fellow at the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University and associate member of the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford.