‘What is a Minsky moment, anyway?’ asks Gerry Stembridge, an Irish satirist. ‘I’ve been reading about them in the papers and have often wondered’. Stembridge is putting the question to Paul McCulley, chief economist at Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund with over $200 billion under management, one of the ten most influential economists on earth. McCulley is sporting a T-shirt and jeans. The two men, Celtic comic and American financial whiz, are on stage in a theatre in Kilkenny, a bijou provincial city in south-east Ireland. It’s Saturday night and they’re facing a sell-out crowd — all of whom have paid to watch a debate on global economics and most of whom aren’t waiting until the interval to have a drink. ‘Right — Minsky moments,’ says McCulley, launching into a deeply technical explanation. We hear of the fabled post-war Chicago-born economist Hyman Minsky and his financial instability hypothesis. Minsky deeply admired the 19th-century Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, we’re told, and developed an influential post-Keynesian criticism of the neoclassical synthesis. Stembridge picks his moment, turns almost imperceptibly to the crowd and raises an eyebrow of bafflement. The gesture draws a few titters, stopping McCulley in his tracks. ‘OK, let’s cut the crap,’ exclaims Pimco’s finest. ‘A Minsky moment is when the markets freak out, shares plunge big time and the shit hits the fan.’ The theatre erupts, loud applause punctuated by wolf whistles. And so begins a solid hour of riveting economic discourse, with plenty of audience participation and probing but, above all, a stream of improvised gags.
Welcome to Kilkenomics — a festival combining up-to-the-minute economic analysis with raucous, no-holds-barred comedy. It’s an unlikely mix, but it works. Maybe that’s because this unique hybrid event, dubbed ‘Davos with laughs’, is set in Ireland — a place where, even in the teeth of adversity, people like to see the funny side.
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