A business cycle of some sort may be the inevitable result of interactions involved in a complex dynamic system such as an economy. We know that cycles are the norm for such natural phenomena as the weather and animal populations, and some tendency in this direction is also probably intrinsic to economic behaviour.
The first Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Ragnar Frisch for work on how business cycles can be propagated in simple models of the economy, and others such as Samuelson and Hicks expanded on this.2 More recently, the Real Business Cycle3 school of economists have taken this in a new direction by regarding all cycles as being a natural result of changes in the supply side of the economy.