Product Details

The Washington Post - Greg Ip

The research that went into this book has established Reinhart and Rogoff as leading authorities on crises, routinely cited by policymakers, academics and journalists (including me). Everyone working on economic policy should own This Time is Different and open it for a bracing blast of sobriety when things seem to be going well.

Idaho Statesman

[A] valuable new book.

Shanghai Daily

Having studied mountains of economic data during the past eight centuries, the authors insightfully point out the highly repetitive nature of financial crises resulted from a dangerous mix of hubris, euphoria and amnesia.

Harold James - The American Interest

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have delivered a powerful and eloquent statement. . . . Reinhart and Rogoff have done an extraordinary job in putting together statistics on government debt—a task that economic historians should have done long ago but shied away from because of the difficulties of defining 'government', which is often complex and multi-layered.

Bob Lenzner - Forbes.com

Here's a deep and rewarding assignment for all of you, young and old, poor and rich, bullish and bearish. Retire to a quiet spot with a copy of This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

Liaquat Ahamed - National Interest

For those who want to relearn the forgotten lessons of the past, This Time is Different, by economics professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, is an excellent place to start. . . . These are lessons worth learning.

James Pressley - Bloomberg News

Wouldn't it be nice to have $1,000 for every time a pundit proclaims an era of endless prosperity, consigning booms and busts to the dumpster of history? The next time you hear that canard (and you will) pour yourself a single malt and dip into Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff's landmark study, This Time Is Different. Wherever you open the book, you'll find proof that debt-fueled expansions have ended in financial ruin for hundreds of years. . . . The result is a visual history laid out in beguilingly simple graphs and tables, making the book both definitive—a must read for professors and investors—and accessible to a wider audience.

Arkansas Business

Rogoff and Reinhart . . . provide an eye-opening look at the cycles of boom and bust and how governments deal with those cycles.

William Easterly - AidWatch

[A]wesome.

Hideo Tsuchiya - Nikkei Weekly

One book in particular has been circulating among economists and market insiders. This Time is Different analyzes vast amounts of historical data on financial debacles, including state failures around the world, bank crises, currency woes and high inflation. The title satirizes those who fail to learn from past blunders and repeat them while insisting, 'This time is different.'

Daniel Akst - CNNMoney.com

Unlike prior narrative accounts of market panics from such finance writers as Charles Kindleberger and Edward Chancellor, Reinhart and Rogoff give us a data-driven study that is global in sweep but also a model of clarity. The authors package their notably nonhysterical analysis of the latest crisis in a large, self-contained section of the book inviting harried readers to skip right ahead to it.

Alen Mattich - Dow Jones Newswires

[I]nstant classic tome on debt crises.

Arnold Kling - Econlog.com

This is certainly one of the must-read books of the year.

Finance & Development

Reinhart and Rogoff present a sobering reminder that financial crises are a serial phenomenon—caused in no small part by the seductive 'this-time-is-different syndrome,' the prevalent belief that to us, here and now, old economic laws of motion no longer apply. Their ambitious quantitative history of financial crises draws out sweeping parallels between financial crises, across times and continents; and between inflating away domestic debt, currency debasements, and defaults on external debt.

Jon Hilsenrath - Wall Street Journal

[O]ne of the most important economic books of 2009.

Harvard Business Review

This book's distinctive strength is that it's built around a massive international database going back as far as twelfth-century China and medieval Europe.

Paul Wiseman - USA Today

Financial folly, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff show in this groundbreaking book, knows no boundaries and has no expiration date. . . . For a book built around numbers, This Time is Different makes for surprisingly good reading. The authors are well aware that human nature is at the heart of the disasters they document, and they enliven the text with brief and amusing accounts of charlatans and cheats.

Barron's

A tour de force of quantitative analysis covering financial crises affecting 66 countries over the past 800 years, the book identifies pre-crisis patterns that recur with eerie consistency. This Time is Different is a must-read for anyone on the lookout for canaries in coal mines.

Economist

[E]ssential reading . . . both for its originality and for the sobering patterns of financial behaviour it reveals.

Andrew Ross Sorkin - New York Times

[A] terrific book.

Greg Ip - Washington Post

Everyone working on economic policy should own This Time is Different and open it for a bracing blast of sobriety when things seem to be going well.

Daniel Gross - Newsweek

[A] fine new history of financial debacles.

Robin Wells and Paul Krugman - New York Review of Books

This Time is Different takes a Sergeant Friday, just-the-facts-ma'am approach: before we start theorizing, let's take a hard look at what history tells us. One side benefit of this approach is that the current book manages to be both extremely useful to professional economists and accessible to the intelligent lay reader. The Reinhart-Rogoff approach has already paid off handsomely in making sense of current events.

David Warsh - Harvard Magazine

This Time is Different . . . is an unusually powerful bull detector designed to protect investors and taxpayers alike—eventually, at least, and provided the spirit is willing. . . . The book's most memorable passages—what the authors call its 'core life'—are to be found not in colorful stories about long-ago personalities, but rather in its various tables and figures. They take some time to comprehend, but any responsible citizen can and ought to consider they evidence they present. It is overwhelming.

Neil Reynolds - Globe & Mail

[S]uperb.

Martin Wolf - Financial Times

The four most dangerous words in finance are 'this time is different.' Thanks to this masterpiece by Carmen Reinhart at the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard, no one can doubt this again. . . . The authors have put an immense amount of work into collecting the data financial institutions needed if they were to have any chance of making quantitative risk management work.

Andrew Gamble - New Statesman

The credit crunch of 2007 became the financial crash of 2008 and the recession of 2009. But there has been much debate about the scale of this crisis, and how it ranks against previous events. Reinhart and Rogoff have produced the most detailed study yet of financial crises, going back as far as 12th-century China. . . . [This Time is Different] will be a vital source of reference in debates on the causes and consequences of financial crises. By cataloguing so thoroughly every known instance of financial crisis, it performs a significant service and opens up new lines of inquiry.

Choice

Reinhart and Rogoff have compiled an encyclopedic analysis of the history of financial crises over the last 750 years. But their volume is not merely of historical interest. Rather, it has great relevance for anyone interested in understanding how the current financial crisis is likely to unfold.

Irish Times

[T]his is the kind of economics we desperately need, as it is relevant, fact-based and replete with wisdom from the past—and lessons for the future.

What People Are Saying

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"

What People Are Saying

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"

What People Are Saying

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"

What People Are Saying

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"

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents