Hyman Minsky, the late American credit-cycle expert, never tired of teaching that credit cycles were a regular feature of our economy.

After prolonged periods of easy money led to careless bank lending, a day of reckoning followed when the money music stopped playing: Banks made a belated effort to cut back on lending to strengthen their weakened balance sheets.

That in turn generally helped send the economy into recession, which caused the banks to cut back credit even further.

Judging by its latest World Economic Report, the International Monetary Fund is well aware of credit-cycle risks.

In an unusually blunt statement, IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said Tuesday, “Below the surface, financial market turbulence is building and the world economic situation is quite fragile.”

Before even thinking about raising interest rates at its next policy meeting, the Federal Reserve should heed the IMF’s credit-cycle warning — especially since there is every reason to expect the credit crunch this time around will be more severe than in most previous cycles.

By raising interest rates again, the Fed would be heightening the risk the country gets a hard economic landing by compounding the credit crunch’s cooling effect on the economy.

Among the reasons to fear a severe credit crunch this time: It will have been preceded by an extended period of unusually easy money conditions.

In response to 2020’s COVID-induced recession, not only did the Fed keep interest rates at their zero-lower bound for too long and allow the broad money supply to balloon by an unprecedented cumulative 40%; it also flooded the market with liquidity by purchasing a staggering $5 trillion in US Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

The Fed’s largesse created equity and housing market bubbles both at home and abroad.

Even more serious, it contributed to a world-debt surge to a record level and encouraged reckless financial-market lending at low interest rates to borrowers with dubious ability to repay.

These recipients included highly leveraged US and European corporate borrowers, the troubled emerging market economies, real commercial property-market developers and cryptocurrency lending platforms.

Yet another reason to fear: the unusually rapid rate at which the Fed has been forced to hike interest rates in its effort to regain control over inflation.

After lulling markets into believing low interest rates would last forever, over the past 12 months the Fed has raised rates by a cumulative 4.75%.

With the notable exception of the early-1980s Volcker rate hikes, never before has the Fed raised rates so rapidly.

Anyone who doubts we are well on our way to a credit crunch has not been paying attention to regional banks’ plight and the tightening in bank lending standards that was occurring even before the Silicon Valley Bank failure.

SVB’s collapse has shone a light on regional banks’ excessive degree of real commercial-property lending as well as the large losses these banks have incurred on their long-dated Treasury bond holding as a result of rising interest rates.

It turns out some 28% of the regional banks’ loan portfolio is tied to the real commercial-property sector, while the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates US banks are sitting on some $620 billion in unrealized losses on their bond holdings.

As depositors have taken fright at regional banks’ shaky financial positions, these banks have little alternative but to restrict their lending.

That could very well lead to a dreaded banking-sector credit crunch.

It would be a mistake to think the crunch will be restricted to regional banks.

Rather, as the IMF recently reminded us, there is every reason to be concerned about the so-called shadow banks that are lightly regulated, highly leveraged and dangerously interconnected with the banking system.

These shadow banks — which include the hedge funds, equity funds, insurance companies and pension funds — now intermediate more credit than the banks and are prone to make riskier loans than banks do.

The Fed has a sorry record of being caught flat-footed by major economic and financial-market events that were largely of its own making.

In 2008, the Fed was totally surprised by the sub-prime mortgage crisis that brought on the Great Recession.

More recently, the Powell Fed has been blindsided by inflation’s surge to a 40-year high and the trouble at the regional banks.

We have to hope the Fed has been humbled by its past policy mistakes and now recognizes the real possibility a predictable credit crunch will send the economy into a tailspin.

Maybe then the Fed will do the right thing and put an end to its interest-rate hiking cycle that risks contributing to a very hard economic landing.

American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Desmond Lachman was a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging-market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.