This Time Is Different - Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

Book Review: This Time Is Different - Eight centuries of financial folly by Carmen M. Reinhart

The authors of the book Rogoff and Reinhart were perplexed by what they were perceiving years before this book was written so before they were the ones who saw the crisis coming. This book is about the financial crisis that has plagued the centuries of human history.

Unlike other books which gives the readers only instances about how bad the situation was, this book gives a more detailed look into the causes that brought along the crisis and what the future implications of it are. In some sense the book is soothing in that we have been here before. On the other hand, this particular crisis is one of only two that were truly global. He calls this one "The Second Great Contraction" (the first, of course, referring to the great depression.)

The authors of the book draw their data from rather unconventional and abstract sources. They are able to reveal to us that whatever the world is facing at the moment, it has actually already occurred in the past including all the bailouts, currency pressures, sovereign pressures, and contagion. They state that the usual causes of such crisis are common but the domestic ones where the people are conned by their own country men are rare and are also known as domestic defaults. They hint that the cost of such defaults will be disclosed in small parts as the bailouts and in large part in the lost revenues.

This book will serve as a great guide and a very useful source of data and information to the society. The readers may be disappointed by the lack of exaggeration and the large amount of data given in the text. The authors have found it of no use to spend words on who was the bigger "idiot" for the crisis but they rather stress their criticism on the conclusion.

The book will serve as a fine reference for those students who are interested in the current global monetary crisis.

This Time Is Different - Eight centuries of financial foolish exposures centuries of financial mistakes and our lack of power to stop them from recurring.