Month: October 2011

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing–and recovering–their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, “this time is different”–claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes–from medieval currency debasements to today’s subprime catastrophe.

comment snippets at Google Books:

This is the most important book that no one will ever read.

…financial markets are not self-regulating. Competition for profit leads lenders to take on dangerous and ultimately deadly levels of risk…

… the basics of economics don’t really change, no matter what fantasies people come to believe.

SO much of economics is pure theory with no attempt to verify…

*Very* data heavy, but they walk you through it pretty well.

Don’t we realize facts are sacred?

“They took the basic subprime losses and magnified them to a point at which no one — not banks, not investors, not entire governments — could bear the cost of the massacre that followed.”

Heidi Moore says,

“The problem is that even when only some of the people get fooled, all of us are paying all of the time.”

Banks should tell the truth.

To everyone.

“Wall Street is the factory for all the financial products in the United States, and you can’t allow a factory to put out some poisonous products and claim the rest are healthy.”