This paper provides a brief analysis of three major questions raised in the context of the recent global financial crisis. First, how similar is the crisis to previous episodes? We argue that the crisis featured some close similarities to earlier ones, including the presence of credit and asset...

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly is one of the best, if not the best, books ever written on the history of financial crises. It presents a comprehensive survey of financial crises utilizing an extraordinary database of macroeconomic and financial series. The massive...

The paper analyzes the financial crisis of through the lens of market failures and regulatory failures. We present a case that there were four primary failures contributing to the crisis: excessive risk-taking in the financial sector due to mispriced government guarantees; regulatory focus on...