This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

The book is significant and substantial. The data collated by the authors from other sources or emanating from their own research is impressive. But the book is not simply the product of hard working and meticulous authors but also of intelligent ones. The authors are insightful and incisive. The wealth of data render tables and graphs illustrate the points made in the text with crystalline clarity. The authors certainly do not lack wit but their aim is not to entertain and create pyrotechnics but to inform, provide substance and in this way fulfill the reader in his/her gaining insight into the nature, severity, indicators and sequencing of a wide array of financial crises. The authors are meticulous and explain with professional integrity to the reader the methodologies they employ and the merits but also limitations of these methodologies;they are considerate to the reader to the point of advising which parts to skip without losing continuity. It is true that the book is rigorous and scholarly but accessible to the intelligent layman with elementary knowledge in Statistics and modest exposure to Economics vocabulary.The authors dispel compellingly and conclusively the "this-time-is-different" syndrome. The syndrome simply stated is that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the current boom, unlike the many that preceded catastrophic collapses in the past, is built on sound fundamentals, structural reforms, technological innovation, and good policy. The book in detailing crises that have arisen over the past eight centuries exposes this myth and shows that boom-bust cycles recur with relentless regularity, a trend that is likely to continue in the future.But the preceding serves simply as a point of departure and the focus of the book is on the crises themselves while systematic data and Macroeconomic Time Series cover the period 1800-2008.The book examines a wide array of financial crises such as sovereign defaults (foreign and domestic), banking crises, exchange rate crises, hyperinflation while it observes that crises often occur in clusters. The penultimate chapter examines situations such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the latest world wide financial crisis which it labels the "Second Great Contraction"- in which crises occur in clusters and on a global scale.The book shows that advanced countries and economies may have "graduated" from serial default on sovereign debt and recurrent episodes of very high inflation as the cases of Austria, France, Spain and others illustrate. But History tells us that "graduation" from recurrent banking financial crises is much more elusive and that advanced economies are as vulnerable to them as emerging economies.The literature suggests that markedly rising asset prices, slowing real economic activity, large current account deficits, and sustained debt built ups (whether public, private, or both) are important precursors to financial crisis;also sustained capital inflows are particularly strong markers for financial crises. The preceding were very prevalent and pronounced preceding the subprime crisis in the United States which evolved into a major global financial crisis parallel only to the Great Depression of the 1930s.The aftermath of severe financial crises particularly global are characterized by asset market collapses which are deep and prolonged, profound collapses in output and employment, and government debt that explodes not only due to bail outs but also due to collapse in revenues and soaring interest rates on debt.Serious global financial crises are painful and protracted events extending over several years.In concluding, I cannot recommend the book strongly enough to the serious reader but at the same time I caution that the book is not suited to the casual reader and the faint-hearted.

The authors have written a monster of a refence book which spans 800 years of financial history. It's somewhat galling to see Brown/Darling on TV declaring "this time is different", and "we're in uncharted waters, we've not been here before", only to read just how many times we HAVE been here before. Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of stupidity is making the same mistake again and again?I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It's not a light bedtime read but is accessible and more than readable, and more's the point, you can dip in to whatever chapter is relevant for your enquiry. There are swathes of tables and reference charts, and the later chapters deal with the current crisis - which we learn is not new (though the debt mountain is the greatest on record).I would suggest it helps to have a modicum of understanding of world finance, this is not a book for beginners (for that go to "Conspiracy of the Rich" by Robert Kiyosaki - possibly the best there is to really get inside what's going on in the world of finance and highly readable), but for those already engaged in this area, "This Time is Different" is essential.

This, I suspect, is one of those books, like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History Of Time, which far fewer people read than own. It is not a book of popular economics, and it does not have a straightforward story line. It is, however, a book of extraordinary significance to our times, and of more immediate importance, I'd venture, than Professor Hawking's opus. This is a book that looks backwards, sideways and forwards all at the same time, examining financial crises of the past, drawing comparisons with the current crisis, and outlining some ways those of the future may be spotted on the horizon and at least alleviated. It warns particularly of the all-too-frequent tendency of developing countries to assume that times of plenty will never end and therefore to spend profligately, a tendency also seen in certain developed countries. Find the steepest point in the uptrend and extrapolate to infinity. We're rich forever!In creating this relatively short but gigantically impressive and influential (while some possibly have not read it, many nevertheless have) work the authors have dug deep into what archives they have been able to delve. At times the charts are so numerous the text has a job keeping up. The tables, too, are frequent, informative and, often, frightening. But they underline the herculean task involved in prising the data out of some hands, and make a case for a centralised clearing house for making such data transparent, rather than the current opacity and obfuscation.The central point, of course, is that the fundamental tenets of economics do not change. You can't spend what you'll never have and get away with it. There's a price to pay, always, as the world economy, and especially the increasingly pauperised south Europeans are now finding. This time, and any other time you care to mention, really is not different. The dotcom boom was replete with spotty youths accusing the oldsters that they didn't "get it", all too often hounding them out of the boardroom so they could observe at a distance as their dire predictions came true. Ditto with the armies of derivatives sellers explaining how their CDOs, CDSs and their like would completely diversify risk away. Instead, they were the root of the problem as the subprime deck of cards came tumbling down, leading to the discovery that much of the risk had been diversified away to the same place.Perhaps of most pressing interest is the coverage received by Greece, including the disclosure that since independence in 1820 the country has spent over half the time in default, and looks like continuing that illustrious achievement for a few more years still. But the authors use the example of Argentina in 2001-2 to demonstrate the perils awaiting should Greece leave the eurozone, a sentiment echoed by, amongst others, former central-bank governors of Argentina and Mexico (The Economist, February 18th 2012), who remind us of the chaos following the abandonment of Argentina's peg to the dollar and point out that, given the deep integration of Greece with the rest of Europe, the result of the country abandoning the euro would be many times worse.We have, say Reinhart and Rogoff, learnt a lot about the way the world economy works since the Great Depression. But we have much left to learn, and besides, the world is constantly in a state of change and the learning process never ends. Their book is a valuable part of that learning process.