Financial innovations are associated with market crises. Hyman Minsky singles out financial innovations as particularly prone to instability so as to necessitate governmental intervention. Processes of innovation and diffusion in new products and in new financial instruments have commonalities...

The article argues that home equity borrowing is an instance of Max Weber's concept of increasing rationalization of society. The dramatic growth in U.S. home equity borrowing is associated with an increasingly fungible orientation to the home, in which a significant portion of this borrowing is...