The Bubble Hunters

Unlike many academics, the Rogoff and Reinhart team are delivering something priceless with their research and writing - a global record, based on data not theory, of every major bubble and crisis in world history.

No ideology, no proselytizing, just the facts, ma'am.

From the New York Times:

Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.

Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, “This Time Is Different,” a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. It is a panoramic opus, both geographically and temporally, covering crises from 66 countries over the last 800 years.

Knowing what to look for and having a sense of timelines can be extraordinarily profitable when gaming a euphoria or depression in one's own time.  There are consistent threads in the narratives of many bubbles throughout history, there is a rhythm to every crisis and its waves of emanation.

I am currently finishing up Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money (an essential read), but I may be picking up This Time Is Different next.

Source:

Economists Who Did Their Homework (NYT)