If they were to hand out medals for predicting the global financial crisis, the Gold Medal for having predicted the crisis must go to Irving Fisher, who in 1933 developed the "Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions" - a piece which remains the best description of what happens to an economy that succumbs to excessive debt in the context of low inflation. We are now reliving the horror he warned us against.

Image: The Digerati Life

Silver goes to Hyman Minsky, for combining Fisher's insights with the vision of a cyclical economy he inherited from Schumpeter, and investor behaviour under uncertainty he acquired from Keynes, to develop the "Financial Instability Hypothesis". This theory explains how a period of economic tranquillity can lead to runaway expectations that induce a debt-financed speculative bubble like the one that we partied through from 1994 until 2007.

I'll award myself the Bronze, for having taken these two inspirations and developed mathematical models of financial instability in the early 1990s, which were the reason I expected that at some stage a serious financial denouement would arrive. My first academic paper on this topic, entitled "Finance and Economic Breakdown", was published in 1995.

I have a substantial number of colleagues in non-orthodox academic economics who, by their own developments of Minsky's analysis, also deserve awards for prescience. Prominent here are Wynne Godley, Marc Lavoie, Jan Kregel, Randy Wray, and Michael Hudson. Institutions like the Jerome Levy Institute and the Economics Department at the University of Missouri Kansas City have supported their work.

The most prominent relatively orthodox economist who foresaw this crisis was Robert Shiller, who originated the term Irrational Exuberance that was later attributed to Alan Greenspan. He has done an invaluable service by developing a long run price index for American housing.

Few academics have been as active in the public arena as they have been in scholarly research. Nouriel Roubini has made the outstanding public intellectual contribution here, with his RGE Monitor, which began operating in 2004-though it is a subscription only, for-profit site. Dean Baker of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research has also made substantive public and analytic contributions.

I began my public commentary on the debt crisis itself in December 2005, and have maintained a blog on this since mid-2006. Michael Hudson coined the phrase the FIRE Economy (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) to describe the foundations of this speculative excess, and his website has significant material on the crisis.

Several notable stock market contrarians predicted a finance-induced catastrophe, none more so than Marc Sexton, who established the Fiendbear website in 1996, after starting to comment on the madness of the then very young Internet Bubble in 1995.

The most prominent contrarian commentator is Eric Janszen, who established the iTulip website in November 1998 to parody the then rampant ‘Internet Bubble' as a speculative mania. He shut the site down after the Dotcom Crash of 2000 only to be forced to start it again as the Subprime Catastrophe gained steam.

Not long after iTulip began, the financial market analyst Doug Noland started the Credit Bubble Bulletin, which was probably the most incisive academically-grounded commentary.

The academic economists who predicted this crisis were ignored because the mainstream of the economics profession follows what is known as neoclassical economics, which ignores debt and models the economy as if it is always in equilibrium. The contrarians were ignored because for so long, the way to make money was to "go with the herd". Today, conventional neoclassical economics is being starkly proven wrong by this very crisis, while contrarians are now the only ones making money.