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...

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 global scope and depth of the 2007-2009 crisis is unprecedented in the post World War II period. As such, the most relevant comparison benchmark is the Great Depression, or the Great Contraction as dubbed by Friedman and Schwartz (1963). We highlight some of the similarities between these...

The preceding sections have predominantly focused on the antecedents of financial crises. Namely, the emphasis has been on the ability of a variety of indicators, including the credit ratings, to anticipate crises and characterize the extent to which a country is vulnerable. An application of...

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...

The aim of the article is to compare 2008-2010 recessions in individual EU countries. For the comparison a new quantitative measure – recession magnitude scale – is used. The scale is derived from (negative) quarterly GDP growth rates during a recession and its duration. Moreover, recessions...

In our recent paper, (Reinhart and Reinhart, 2010) we examine the behavior of real GDP (levels and growth rates), unemployment, inflation, bank credit, and real estate prices in a twenty one-year window surrounding selected adverse global and country-specific shocks or events. In this note, we...

In this article recession magnitudes in Europe, the USA and Japan during the Great Recession are compared. The strongest recessions (of severe category) occurred in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, while recessions in Japan and the USA were significantly weaker. Even the strongest recession (in...