Booms and Depressions: Some First Principles.

THE DEBT-DEFLATION THEORY OF GREAT DEPRESSIONS.

First edition. 8vo (192 x 132mm). xxi, [1], 258 pp. Original green cloth, spine lettered in green, dust jacket (jacket slightly marked, edge worn with some minor loss to the corners, some light spotting to the endpapers, otherwise an excellent copy overall). New York, Adelphi Co.

The first major presentation of Irving Fisher's famous "debt-deflation theory of great depressions" that stresses "overindebtedness" and the deflation that follows as the two dominant factors in the great booms and depressions of the business cycle. The essential feature of Fisher's theory is that "debt-financed Schumpeterian innovations fuel a boom, followed by a recession which can turn into depression via an unstable interaction between excessive real debt burdens and deflation" (New Palgrave).

Following the Great Crash of 1929, Fisher threw himself behind the notoriously difficult theory of economic fluctuations, further outlining his "debt-deflation" theory in a 1933 paper delivered to the Twenty-First Session of the International Statistical Institute and published in the same month in the first volume of Econometrica.

Fisher M-1742.

Stock Code: 231110