This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

This book would have made a good academic paper. It does not make a good popular economics book. It spends forever explaining how it got its data, how it analyzed it, what other people did, and what they missed. This would be a nice few pages in an academic paper. But as book chapters, they get very old.

The book is also very repetitive. The authors explain what they are about to do, they explain how they did it, then they recap their explanations. Then in another chapter, they explain it again, just in case you skipped an earlier chapter.

The central point is that bank panics and government defaults have also happened and likely will continue. Often they occur when governments and others overextend themselves in boom times, thinking that this time is different. Governments often default out of convenience rather than necessity. They can also use tools like inflation and other currency debasement to reduce the debt.

These many chapters are primarily lead in for the brief final chapter on the current financial crisis, the real-estate bubble induced "great contraction". This is shown to be a global contraction with many of the similar characteristics of other crises. The authors make pains to point out that all the signs were similar to previous panics (including people adamant that "this time is different"). However, even this knowledge is not useful if politicians are not willing to act on it. (And since acting would usually involve breaking a big boom, they are reluctant to do so.)

Summarize the last chapter, and you could have a good paper, using ample data to show that this time is not different. Alas, this gem is hidden under 20 times its weight of repetitive blather.