The Past Speaks

“The same kinds of politics that influence other aspects of society also help explain why some countries, such as the United States, suffer repeated banking crises, while others, such as Canada, avoid them altogether.”

That sentence pretty much sums up the thesis of  Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)  by Charles W. Calomiris Stephen H. Haber. This important book deserves to be in the shelves of every policymaker, every expert in finance, and everyone who teaches business and/or economic history. 

Calomiris is the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia Business School. Haber is the A. A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.