Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James.
Yale University Press, 367 pp., $32.50
The Great Crashes: Lessons from Global Meltdowns and How to Prevent Them
by Linda Yueh.
London: Penguin Business, 248 pp., £22.00; £10.99 (paper)
There are so many ways for an economy to go wrong. It can decline, stagnate, slow down, or overheat. We are used to the common technical definition of a recession: two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, as measured by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The long nineteenth century was littered with panics: 1825, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1896, and 1907, at least. Markets have not stopped panicking since 1907, but nobody calls the Black Monday stock market conniption “the Panic of 1987.” Instead we have moved on to…