Manias, Panics and Crashes by Kindleberger and Aliber

I was pretty excited when I first sat down to read this. As someone in the field and who lived through, really up close and personal, the financial crash which has now extended into a true liquidity crunch I thought this might offer a number of interesting ways of thinking about the 'now' from the 'long view'.

And in very brief glimpses scattered through the book this is what the authors manage. However, the vast majority of the book is focussed elsewhere.

Confusingly perhaps there isn't a central narrative through the book, and for an academic work of history this is a problem. Paragraphs can jump around across centuries with no commentary and frequently, the more detailed examinations of crashes simply stop with no effort at explaining the implications of such events.

What I find hard to deal with here is that one of the central theses - that crashes ripple through history and can lay the foundation for others so that no individual financial manias can really be thought of in isolation - is simply unsupported. The final couple of chapters move away from history proper and look at more modern events. The first of these is Lehman (and I'm sorry to report that it really offers no insight and certainly doesn't stack up to accounts such as Too Big To Fail). The second is a look at the aftermath of the global credit crunch that really began around 2007.

Kindleberger and Aliber manage to identify common themes in manias and crashes but don't build a case for what that means or what insight it might represent for our understanding of economics. More annoyingly they study so many of their examples in a theoretical vacuum - with no concept of how global politics (the cold war) or developments in economic theory allowed for different expressions of the same idea of an economic mania and crash.

Shame.