During the last financial crisis, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, both now teaching at the Charles River campus of Plagiarism University, wrote an engagingly readable and well-received book, This Time is Different (2009), describing ways in which debt boom and default cycles have varied little since the Middle Ages.
The most amusing of these similarities is that those who profit most from each such cycle’s bubble phase sustain it by assuring the gullible that this debt bubble, unlike all its predecessors, will not end badly – that this time is different.
Reinhart’s and Rogoff’s warning seems best appreciated as reverse-reprising Tolstoy’s bon mot, in “Anna Karenina”, that although “all happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
