This site is an independent visual companion to Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 8th edition (2023), by Charles P. Kindleberger, Robert Z. Aliber, and Robert N. McCauley. The framing — Minsky’s crisis model applied to four centuries of history — is the book’s. All text on this site is paraphrased in our own words; nothing here substitutes for reading the book, which is warmly recommended.
Modern price series are genuine public market data; each chart names its source in the caption. Series for early episodes are published academic reconstructions and are labeled as such. Where no trustworthy series exists, we draw the mechanics instead of inventing a curve.
Every page ends with what the crash cost the people who lived through it. Those figures follow the same rule as the charts: each one names its source, and the vignettes are drawn from the documented record — court filings, official statistics, archival research and the historians who have worked through them. Nothing in them is invented or dramatised. Where a crash cost people little, the page says so; the contrast between bubbles financed with equity and bubbles financed with credit is one of the book’s central claims.
Built with Astro, D3 (build-time SVG), and GSAP ScrollTrigger. Type is Playfair Display and Source Serif 4. The parchment is procedural — SVG turbulence noise, no images. Nothing on this site is investment advice.