This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

This Time Is Different (2009) is economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff's quantitative history of financial crises, built on data from 66 countries across eight centuries. The authors track sovereign defaults, banking crises, inflation and currency crashes from medieval royal debts to the 2008 subprime meltdown, and find that such crises recur with striking regularity and often follow borrowing booms. Their title names the error they see before each one: the belief among lenders, borrowers and policymakers that old rules of debt and risk no longer apply.

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Bill Gates: “Every one of these books changed my worldview, and I highly recommend them if you're looking for inspiring reading.”
Fareed Zakaria: “The "estimate" I refer to is in the scholarly book by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, "This Time It's Different" – which I did read.”