This Time is Different, Again? The United States Five Years after the Onset of Subprime

We focus on four previous systemic financial crises that the United States has experienced since 1870. These include the crisis of 1873 (called the Great Depression until the 1930s), the 1893 crisis, the panic of 1907, and the Great Depression. Given that all of the earlier crises predate the creation of deposit insurance in 1933, and that three of the four crises predate the establishment of a central bank in the United States, one could well quibble about the claim that the relevant institutions are more comparable across centuries in the United States than across advanced countries over the last thirty years. Be that as it may, the comparison across systemic US financial crises does not: (i) support the view that the US recoveries from pre-WWII systemic crises were any swifter than the general cross-country pattern and (ii) that the US has fared worse this time around than in previous systemic crises.