During the 2008 global economic meltdown, people who wanted to know what had caused the crash became familiar with the “Minsky Moment”: the commonsense theory, developed by economist Hyman Minsky, that good times create bad times. If the housing market goes up for long enough, investors feel that it will always continue to go up. This complacency feeds speculation that ends in collapse. Now, the gleeful piling on over the (admittedly bad) bedside manner of Mayor Pete — Pete Buttigieg, President Joe Biden’s hapless Department of Transportation secretary — in East Palestine, Ohio, obscures the fact that we’re having a Minsky Moment in regulated transportation: It’s been so safe for so long that it’s becoming unsafe.
Free market fundamentalists may wish otherwise, but rail and air transportation, just like financial markets, are not free market industries, and they are not going to be. Most people do not have the time or the knowledge to study carefully whether their bank is going to go bankrupt. They just need a safe space to put their money, so the government guarantees most bank deposits. These guarantees, in turn, mean that the government must regulate banks to make sure they don’t take undue risks. This system works most of the time, except for when both the banks and the government think that financial wizardry has eliminated all risk.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
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