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Kenneth S. Rogoff
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This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly Kindle Edition

by Carmen M. Reinhart (Author), Kenneth S. Rogoff (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 861 ratings
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The acclaimed New York Times bestselling history of financial crises

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 and eight centuries, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises—including government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes—from medieval currency debasements to the subprime mortgage catastrophe. Reinhart and Rogoff provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations.

A remarkable history of financial folly, This Time Is Different will influence financial and economic thinking and policy for decades to come.

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    491 pages
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    Princeton University Press
  4. Publication date
    September 11, 2009
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Two top-notch economists provide a clear and interesting explanation of why economic crises keep occurring. Broadly speaking, downturns such as the one we are recovering from are historically associated with characteristics that should sound quite familiar to today's investors.

Review

"This Time Is Different is a tremendously exciting, topical, and controversial book on the history of debt and default. This one belongs on everyone's shelf."―Barry Eichengreen, author of The European Economy since 1945

"This is quite simply the best empirical investigation of financial crises ever published. Covering hundreds of years and bringing together a dizzying array of data, Reinhart and Rogoff have made a truly heroic contribution to financial history. This single marvelous volume is worth a thousand mathematical models."―Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

"This Time is Different is terrific, for it gives just the perspective we need on the current world economic crisis. People can't expect to understand the current crisis without some in-depth look at past crises. That is exactly what this excellent and timely book provides."―Robert J. Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance and coauthor of Animal Spirits

"You will be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive and insightful analysis of financial crises. Reinhart and Rogoff's superb book is a must-read for anyone looking to understand past and present crises, as well as navigate those of tomorrow."―Mohamed El-Erian, author of When Markets Collide

"I would say that her [Carmen Reinhart's] book with Ken Rogoff on debt crises and financial crises is an extraordinary piece of work."―Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking before the House Budget Committee (6/9/2010)

"The most important authorities probably in the world now on financial crashes are Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. . . . And I read it [This Time is Different]."―Former President Bill Clinton, speech at Youngstown, OH, October 31, 2012

"A classic."―Nouriel Roubini

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004EYT932
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press (September 11, 2009)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 11, 2009
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 15786 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 491 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 861 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Kenneth S. Rogoff

    Kenneth S. Rogoff

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    Kenneth S Rogoff teaches in the Economics Department of Harvard University where he is Thomas D Cabot Professor of Public Policy.During 2001-2003 Rogoff was chief economist at the Internatonal Monetary Fund. His newest book The Curse of Cash, shows why phasing out most (except for small bills) would likely significantly reduce crime and tax evasion, while also helping central banks fight financial crises. His 2009 book, with Professor Carmen M Reinhart of the University of Maryland, was a NY Times and Amazon best seller; it exploits an extensive new database, developed by the authors over many years, and now widely used by researchers, policymakers and investor. Reinhart and Rogoff show the remarkable quantitative similarities in deep financial crises across time and regions. Rogoff's 1996 treatise with Maurice Obstfeld on the Foundations of International Macroeconomics remains the standard graduate reference in the field. His monthly column on global economic issues is published in over fifty countries and a dozen languages. He is also a frequent commentator in the media, including NPR, BBC, The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC and Bloomberg.

    Outside economics, Rogoff was awarded the life title of international grandmaster of chess by the World Chess Federation in 1978. He is married to Natasha Lance Rogoff, and has two children, Gabriel and Juliana.

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  2. Carmen M. Reinhart

    Carmen M. Reinhart

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    Carmen M. Reinhart is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Reinhart held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s, where she became interested in financial crises, international contagion and commodity price cycles. Subsequently, she spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Reinhart has served on numerous editorial boards, panels, and has testified before congress. She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance and trade including: international capital flows, exchange rates, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her papers have been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

    Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises for over a decade. In the early 1990s, she wrote (with Guillermo Calvo) about the fickleness of capital flows to emerging markets and the likelihood of abrupt reversals--before the Mexican crisis of 1994-1995. Prior to the Asian crisis (1997-1998), she documented (with Graciela Kaminsky) the international historical links between asset price bubbles and banking crises, and how the latter could lead to currency crashes creating a "twin crisis." She identified (with Ken Rogoff) the possibility of severe economic dislocations from the sub-prime crisis in 2007. Her work is frequently featured in the financial press around the world, including The Economist, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She has appeared in CNN, CSPAN, BBC, and NPR, among others.

    Her latest book (with Kenneth Rogoff) entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton Press) documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history.

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
861 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book insightful and well-researched. They also mention it provides interesting indicators and analysis to assess and compare crisis conditions across time. Opinions are mixed on the readability, encyclopedia content, and data quality. Some find the overview excellent, while others say it's too complicated. Readers disagree on the economic history, with some finding it simple descriptive statistics and summaries, while others say there is surprisingly little treatment of economic crises in years before 1800.

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InsightValue for moneyReadabilityEncyclopedia contentData qualityEconomic historyBoredomDryness
91 customers mention "Insight"75 positive16 negative

Customers find the book insightful, well-researched, and excellent. They appreciate the interesting indicators and analysis to assess and compare crisis conditions across time. Readers also mention it's readable, with lots of information and references.

"...Yet, the book does have a good deal of information about other major banking crises and how they ended...." Read more

"...This is a readable economics text which provides historical economic data that are likely to be relevant to the course of the present crisis...." Read more

"This book is one of the most complete reviews of financial crises over the last 800 years that I have seen...." Read more

"...This book is both fascinating and flawed. Starting with the flaws:First, the book is mistitled...." Read more

8 customers mention "Value for money"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book well worth the price. They say it provides a good deal to chew on and is an excellent economic analysis.

"...Great Contraction of 2007" and its aftermath, make this volume well worth the price...." Read more

"...is Different is itself a different sort of volume: it is economics with time depth. It is also one of the densest books ever written...." Read more

"...This gets amount of detail wearisome but it's still worth it." Read more

"...of this book was repetitive and quite academic, it does provide a good deal to chew on. The big question is when will we see the next crisis?..." Read more

119 customers mention "Readability"79 positive40 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the readability of the book. Some mention it's worth reading in its entirety and a valuable contribution to the literature on the current financial crisis. Others say it's dry, boring, hard to read, and overly complicated.

"...Sweeping, factual and accessible, this book will complement, if not replace, Kindleberger's "Manias, Panics, and Crashes" as the first stop to..." Read more

"...Despite my misgivings, I do think the most valuable portion of the book (for me) was the last section which accumulated the information from past..." Read more

"...This is a readable economics text which provides historical economic data that are likely to be relevant to the course of the present crisis...." Read more

"...The lack of transparency and the shenanigans that go on behind the curtains contribute, of course, to the human suffering that ensues in crisis..." Read more

34 customers mention "Encyclopedia content"19 positive15 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the encyclopedia content. Some mention it has an excellent overview, insightful charts, and systematic approach. Others say the book is too complicated, jam-packed with relevant facts, and difficult to read.

"...Sweeping, factual and accessible, this book will complement, if not replace, Kindleberger's "Manias, Panics, and Crashes" as the first stop to..." Read more

"...Rather, the book is quite technical with numerous charts, graphs, and economic analysis; the first 50 pages are devoted solely to setting up the..." Read more

"...financial crises are not identical, they do rhyme and have patterns that are recognizable...." Read more

"...Our aim here is to be expansive, systematic, and quantitative...earlier works take an essentially narrative approach, fortified by relatively sparse..." Read more

12 customers mention "Data quality"6 positive6 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the data quality of the book. Some mention it's impressive and extensive, while others say it's scattered and borderline incoherent.

"...In my opinion, TTID's greatest strength is the massive data set both authors compiled...." Read more

"...The title may be a little misleading as it does not provide equal data of centuries old crises just because we don’t have enough information...." Read more

"...Aside from that this book uses sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallout's occur in clusters and..." Read more

"...ask me, it is dry, boring, hard to read, overly complicated with tons of data and little narrative of the type I was expecting BASED ON THE..." Read more

10 customers mention "Economic history"4 positive6 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the economic history in the book. Some mention that it provides simple descriptive statistics and summaries of various types of financial crises. Others say there was surprisingly little treatment of economic crises in years before 1800, and it did not examine specific crises in detail.

"...Second, their crisis framework is convoluted relative to the crystal clear framework of Charles Kindleberger in [..." Read more

"...Our aim here is to be expansive, systematic, and quantitative...earlier works take an essentially narrative approach, fortified by relatively sparse..." Read more

"...discussed the common causes of financial crises, it did not examine specific crises in detail, save for the U.S. subprime crisis...." Read more

"This book is not for the casual or recreational reader; it includes a lot of economic data, charts, graphs, and time series...." Read more

13 customers mention "Boredom"3 positive10 negative

Customers find the book boring and a waste of money. They say it provides less than expected.

"...The book provided less than I expected...." Read more

"...It is a boring, academic read that repeats itself, is unnecessarily protracted, and has few original insights considering its gargantuan size." Read more

"...Boring!..." Read more

"...Their findings: humans have not learned from past mistakes. The title is ironic and is worthy of Peter DeVries...." Read more

9 customers mention "Dryness"0 positive9 negative

Customers find the book dry and boring.

"...full of charts and explanations of methodology and data sources, necessarily is dry, but this is what gives the authors' argument scholarly..." Read more

"...If you ask me, it is dry, boring, hard to read, overly complicated with tons of data and little narrative of the type I was expecting BASED ON THE..." Read more

"Utterly dry, full of tables and charts, and having such riveting chapter opening sentences like “as we discussed previously in Chapter…”...." Read more

"...At times it's dry, but the authors acknowledge that occasionally directing the uninterested to a more pertinent chapter of the book...." Read more

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Top reviews from the United States

N. Tsafos
5.0 out of 5 stars Crises, Past, Present, Future
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2009
Verified Purchase
It is hard to over-praise "This Time is Different" by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Sweeping, factual and accessible, this book will complement, if not replace, Kindleberger's "Manias, Panics, and Crashes" as the first stop to understanding financial crises. You have to like reading tables and charts to appreciate this book, although its ability to say so much with simple descriptive statistics is enormously appealing.

"This Time is Different" explores many themes: the pervasiveness of financial crises, including among countries which we do not normally associate with crisis. Development and crisis have never been as closely linked as in this reading. Banking crises are omnipresent in advanced and emerging economies alike and have been so for years. There are striking similarities in the build-up to a crisis, whether in emerging or advanced economies: increased public and private debt and asset bubbles in equity or real estate. And the clean-up costs are universally high, not only in direct costs but also in increased assumed liabilities by the state.

The book will have an ever greater impact in at least three ways. First, it is pregnant with ideas. One can see dozens of doctoral theses emerging to complete or revise the data in the book, to test and re-test its hypotheses, and to provide answers to the many puzzles raised therein. From personal finance to sovereign risk rating, from economics to political economy and international relations, this book is full of threads to pull and nuggets to mull over.

Second, the book's direct and continuous assault on the paucity of data on several vital economic indicators is refreshing to those who have spent any time tracking data that is impossible to find. If any effort to get better data springs from this book, driven by governments or intentional organizations, the debts we will owe the authors will be enormous.

Finally, there is the "This Time is Different" lens. At first, I thought it a clever attempt to give the book an angle, which it does. But as you read the book, you sense something more: it is an argument that when things look like they are out of control, they usually are - even when there is no one on earth who can say when the bust will come or what will trigger it. If during the next run-up to a crisis, there are policymakers who say we need to act even though things looks good, this book of 460-odd pages may save us all billions if not trillions of dollars. And how can you beat that?
15 people found this helpful
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Chuck Mann
4.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected, but a good book if you know what you're getting
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2012
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I've just finished reading This Time Is Different. I should say I `finished' reading about two thirds of the book as I skimmed or skipped the most technical portions. The book, as per its subtitle: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, bills itself as comprehensive look at sixty six countries and their financial crises over almost all of the last millennia. Either due to its marketing or my presumptions, I thought the book would be a narrative of pithy coverage of financial crises. Rather, the book is quite technical with numerous charts, graphs, and economic analysis; the first 50 pages are devoted solely to setting up the financial rubric the book will use to analyze its data points. As such, I don't recommend the book for anyone looking for a financial history, or something like The Big Short or The Lords of Finance (as I was). If you're looking for a technical, yet mostly approachable from a lay perspective, analysis of financial crises and how they relate to today, it's great.

Despite my misgivings, I do think the most valuable portion of the book (for me) was the last section which accumulated the information from past experience and applied it to the Great Recession. The book came out in 2009, so it doesn't have a great deal of information about how the late-2000s crisis turned out. Yet, the book does have a good deal of information about other major banking crises and how they ended. Obviously, this type of information is quite timely. And on this account, the current situation doesn't seem so bad, and there are signs for optimism. Major banking crises, apparently, typically raise unemployment by 7% and unemployment grows for 4.8 years, on average. The US unemployment rate (U1) rose from around 4% to 10%, about average, but unemployment has grown for only around two years. Much of this is probably due to systemic causes, but it does undercut almost all of the standard Republican-party economic voodoo, and the deranged `expansionary austerity' that has hurt much of Europe. There's a lot of analysis like this, and with a lot of the recent good economic news, it's interesting to see how that stacks up compared with past crises.

The book's most valuable message conveys is broader than just a technical comparison of the present with the past, but is apparent from the book's title: the past does repeat itself, and did so in 2007. The Great Recession was unique in certain ways, but followed a very particular pattern and carried numerous warning signs. Yet, as with many historical crises, the people in positions of power, contrary to a lot of the demonizing rhetoric heaped upon banks, regulators, politicians, etc., seem to have disregarded this history, took up the kool-aid, and really believed that this time was different. Yet, this time wasn't different, and it's folly to expect that in the future, that time will be anything but the same.
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Alfred Feth
5.0 out of 5 stars Historical Data
Reviewed in Canada on May 25, 2023
Verified Purchase
Uses real historical data that demonstrates very little as debt/GDP ratio exceeds 90%.
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Cliente
5.0 out of 5 stars Data, academy
Reviewed in Italy on February 2, 2020
Verified Purchase
The book is not that easy if you don’t understand well english, but if you do it is a superbe window on 8 centuries of finance.
It contains an insane amount of data, it is very professional and comparable with an academic article
One person found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book to back up your knowledge with hard facts
Reviewed in India on October 17, 2017
Verified Purchase
Authors have done a phenomenal work in putting together the data that forms the backbone of the book. Especially the data on domestic debt across countries boing back to 1800 which is was quite fascinating. Great book to back up your knowledge with hard facts. Not for some one looking for an guilde to economic history
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Rodney van Royden
4.0 out of 5 stars Great research
Reviewed in Australia on October 10, 2023
Verified Purchase
Really azppreciate the book and research. For five stars, I would have preferred a more objective perspective and unifying theme.

Plus would be interesting to see the post GFC update.
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Amazon カスタマー
5.0 out of 5 stars 翻訳版とも購入して良かった
Reviewed in Japan on December 31, 2016
Verified Purchase
内容が充実していてお勧めです。翻訳版と合わせて読むとなおさら良いです。
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