Remembering and forgetting financial crises

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• the Robert Schuman Centre Seminar Series

Professor Youssef Cassis explores how financial history and memory studies can help to better understand the causes of financial crises in this RSC seminar series.

It is usually assumed that financial markets have a short memory. Kenneth Galbraith, the author of a classic history of the Wall Street Crash, observed that: ‘Financial memory from one period of sophisticated stupidity to the next is about 10 to 15 years’. His message is clear: crises are quickly forgotten and excessive risk-taking replaces caution as new business and profit opportunities arise, with the conviction that ‘this time is different’, to use the title of Carmen Reinhart’s and Kenneth Rogoff’s book.

But are financial crises actually remembered –and if so, how, for how long, and by whom? Have any lessons been drawn from them? Surprisingly, there has hardly been any attempt to answer these questions, whether by economists or historians or indeed other social scientists. Professor Youssef Cassis will discuss how combining financial history and memory studies can help to better understand the causes of financial crises, by paying particular attention to the transformation of the memory of the financial crises of the Great Depression of the 1930s, from the end of the Second World War to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.