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. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts--as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. An important book that will affect policy discussions for a long time to come, This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.

/pdf/this-time-is-different-eight-centuries-of-financial-folly-2nx8owhq9y.pdf

This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

The crisis of 2008-09 has focused attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. In this paper we study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the long run based on a newly constructed historical dataset for 12 developed countries over the years 1870-2008, utilizing the data to study rare events associated with financial crisis episodes. We present new evidence that leverage in the financial sector has increased strongly in the second half of the twentieth century as shown by a decoupling of money and credit aggregates, and we also find a decline in safe assets on banks' balance sheets. We also show for the first time how monetary policy responses to financial crises have been more aggressive post-1945, but how despite these policies the output costs of crises have remained large. Importantly, we can also show that credit growth is a powerful predictor of financial crises, suggesting that such crises are

Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles and Financial Crises, 1870-2008

The financial crisis has refocused attention on money and credit fluctuations, financial crises, and policy responses. We study the behavior of money, credit, and macroeconomic indicators over the long run based on a new historical dataset for 14 countries over the years 1870-2008. Total credit has increased strongly relative to output and money in the second half of the twentieth century. Monetary policy responses to financial crises have also been more aggressive, but the output costs of crises have remained large. Credit growth is a powerful predictor of financial crises, suggesting that policymakers ignore credit at their peril. (JEL E32, E44, E52, G01, N10, N20)

/pdf/credit-booms-gone-bust-monetary-policy-leverage-cycles-and-4qfulz4cp9.pdf

National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for "unpleasant" or "undesirable", which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country evidence on happiness and life satisfaction and consider whether these data will likely be replaced by the U-index. I find that first, that there are many similarities. According to both measures happiness is higher for the more educated, for married people, for those with higher income and for whites and lower for the unemployed; is U-shaped in age and un-trended over time in the USA although they are trended up in a number of EU countries and especially so in developing countries. Equivalent results are found using self-reported unhappiness data. Second, there is a large body of data on happiness that is unavailable on the U-index. For example, according to happiness research well-being across nations is lower the higher is the unemployment rate, the current inflation rate and the highest inflation rate in a person's adult life. Higher inequality also lowers happiness. Third, we know little about the predictive power of the U-index. Happiness and life satisfaction data seem able to forecast migration flows. Fourth, happy people are particularly optimistic about the future. Fifth, according to the happiness data the US ranks above France but the U-index suggests the reverse.

International evidence on well-being

Do external imbalances increase the risk of nancial crises? In this paper, we study the experience of 14 developed countries over 140 years (1870{2008). We exploit our long-run dataset in a number of dierent ways. First, we apply new statistical tools to describe the temporal and spatial patterns of crises and identify ve episodes of global nancial instability in the past 140 years. Second, we study the macroeconomic dynamics before crises and show that credit growth tends to be elevated and natural interest rates depressed in the run-up to global nancial crises. Third, we show that recessions associated with crises lead to deeper slumps and stronger turnarounds in imbalances than during normal recessions. Finally, we ask to what extent external imbalances help predict nancial crises. Our overall result is that credit growth emerges as the single best predictor of nancial instability. External imbalances have played an additional role, but more so in the pre-WWII era of low nancialization than today.

/pdf/financial-crises-credit-booms-and-external-imbalances-140-2csyc67t4k.pdf

Financial Crises, Credit Booms, and External Imbalances: 140 Years of Lessons

Related Literature | RDP 2003-07: Housing Wealth, Stock Market Wealth and Consumption: A Panel Analysis for Australia

Using a panel of Australian States, we estimate how changes in household wealth affect consumption expenditure. Both housing and stock market wealth have a significant effect on consumption: a permanent $A1 increase in stock market wealth increases long-run annual consumption by 6–9 cents; the same increase in housing wealth increases annual consumption by around 3 cents. With households’ housing assets more than three times that of stock market assets, a 1 per cent increase in housing wealth has an effect on consumption at least as large as that of a 1 per cent increase in stock market wealth.

/pdf/housing-wealth-stock-market-wealth-and-consumption-a-panel-4aflf9d2n3.pdf

Housing Wealth, Stock Market Wealth and Consumption: A Panel Analysis for Australia*

We study the output costs of 40 systemic banking crises since 1980. Most, but not all, crises in our sample coincide with a sharp contraction in output from which it took several years to recover. Our main findings are as follows. First, the current financial crisis is unlike any others in terms of a wide range of economic factors. Second, the output losses of past banking crises were higher when they were accompanied by a currency crisis or when growth was low at the onset of the crisis. When accompanied by a sovereign debt default, a systemic banking crisis was less costly. And, third, there is a tendency for systemic banking crises to have lasting negative output effects.

Financial Crises and Economic Activity

Prudential instruments are commonly seen as the tools that can be used to deliver the macroprudential policy goals of reducing the frequency and severity of financial crises. And interest rates are traditionally viewed as the means to deliver the macroeconomic stabilization goals of low, stable inflation and sustainable, stable growth. But, at the macroeconomic level, these two sets of policy tools have quite a bit in common. We use a simple macroeconomic model to study the extent to which capital adequacy requirements and interest rates might be substitutes in meeting the objective of stabilizing the economy. We find that in our model both are substitutes for achieving conventional monetary policy objectives. In addition, we show that, in principle, they can both be used to meet financial stability objectives. This implies a need to coordinate the use of macroprudential and traditional monetary policy tools, a need that has clear implications for the construction of the policy framework designed to deliver the joint objectives of macroeconomic and financial stability.

When Capital Adequacy and Interest Rate Policy are Substitutes (and When They are Not)

Exchange rate movements during the global financial crisis of 2007–09 were unusual. Unlike in two previous episodes – the Asian crisis of 1997–98 and the crisis following the Russian debt default in 1998 – in 2008 many countries that were not at the centre of the crisis saw their currencies depreciate sharply. Such crisis-related movements reversed strongly for a number of countries. Two factors are likely to have contributed to these developments. First, during the latest crisis, safe haven effects went against the typical pattern of crisis-related flows. Second, interest rate differentials explain more of the crisis-related exchange rate movements in 2008–09 than in the past. This probably reflects structural changes in the determinants of exchange rate dynamics such as the increased role of carry trade activity.

Exchange Rates During Financial Crises

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