History, Memory, and the Return of Financial Crises after Bretton Woods

Despite the 'return of financial crises' since the end of the Bretton Woods era, a new generation of bankers hardly had any experience or any memory of a previous systemic financial crisis. The events of summer 2007 prompted investors, CEOs, and regulators to investigate the past to understand the present and foresee the future. The 2008 financial crisis strengthened the need to place financial crises in long-term historical perspectives, establish parallels, and make comparisons. Such comparisons, however, have remained sparse and generally reduced past financial crises to stylized facts in a quest for lessons that could be drawn rather than analysed their specifics.

This book is a contribution of history to the study of financial crises, with a focus on whether and how the memory of previous crises has persisted, faded, or changed over time. Intertwining memory and narrative representations of the reality, it investigates the reasons why some crises have been selectively remembered and others apparently forgotten. It does so with a focus on the new era of financial instability that followed the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1973 - a period marked by a series of financial crises (1974, 1982, 1987, 1997, among others); economic, political, and cultural changes (globalization, deregulation, formalized mathematical economics), and culminating in the global financial crisis of 2008.