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IMF Podcasts

Karthik Sastry on Animal Spirits and the Economy

Mar 12, 2025
21:18

While we like to think our financial decisions are based on logic, the truth is, they are largely driven by emotion. So when John Maynard Keynes looked for methods to measure economic fluctuations, animal spirits were a key ingredient. Karthik Sastry is a macroeconomist and assistant professor at Princeton University. In this podcast, he says personal instincts and primal urges are known to cause cycles of boom and bust, and one way to gauge those emotions is through economic narratives. Sastry is coauthor with Joel Flynn of How Animal Spirits Affect the Economy published in Finance and Development magazine.

Transcript: https://bit.ly/43HkuoB

Read the article at IMF.org/fandd

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