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This Time Is Different  By  cover art

This Time Is Different

By: Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff
Narrated by: Sean Pratt
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Publisher's summary

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing - and recovering - their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different" - claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. This book proves that premise wrong.

Covering 66 countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes - from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much - or how little - we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts - as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises.

While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.
©2009 Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (P)2009 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

" This Time Is Different doesn't simply explain what went wrong in our most recent crisis. This book also provides a roadmap of how things are likely to pan out in the years to come.... This Time Is Different is an important addition to the literature of financial history." ( Wall Street Journal)

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

It's Just a Long Series of Descriptions of Charts

I think writing on financial crisis can be interesting like Charles P. Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes or Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. But this requires setting of the historical scene and character development and a humanistic look at bygone times. This isn't at all what Reinhart and Rogoff are trying to do in This Time Is Different. They offer a 5000 mile view of what hundreds of these sorts of financial disasters have in common using a universalist perspective and all set in a dry pedestrian prose. They have some interesting insights but it doesn't make for fun listening. Most of the audiobook consists of just elaborating on the graphs. I can see the graphs but don't you have some interesting historical insights to add? They pointlessly cite past economists for having written some paper on obvious things that don't require any citations. They annoyingly repeat the book's title way too many times along with the trite idea rehashed from all the other financial crisis books about which they don't have anything more interesting to say. They keep calling the current crisis we're in as the Second Great Contraction and use their strange, newly coined phrase excessively. Like most economists they have too high an opinion of their own limited findings and their field of study in general. I could go on...the whole thing is excruciatingly painful to listen to.

The careless reading by Sean Pratt didn't help. All his many small misreadings are too numerous to list. The most glaring was that he read the probability of x, P(x), as "P meaning that x."

This isn't something to enjoy on your morning commute but something to help you through a difficult book if it were required reading in an economics class.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

I need the charts!!!!

Any additional comments?

Great book but have to have the charts and tables in hand to be able to follow.

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Not a good audiobook experience

What disappointed you about This Time Is Different?

This book is highly explicative of financial factors affecting crisis, but is not a good auidobook. Continual references to tables and graphs make it impossible to follow without the PDF (if I could carry along the charts i would just buy the book). In my case, heraing the book while commuting was a less than pleasurable experince, and i hold a undergraduate and graduate degree in finance and business.

What could Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

The book itself might be a fine read, i just completely disagree on the conversion (in this case) from book to audiobook since it is so visual and technical in nature.

What three words best describe Sean Pratt’s performance?

concise dry teacher-like

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

not that i can think of right now

Any additional comments?

i gave it a shot, i heard almost five out of the eight hours trying to see if it "got better", i dont know if it is too late or maybe you dont have this policy but is there any way to get a refund?

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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  • L
  • 04-22-12

of course it's not different this time

a must-read review of the history of financial crises. for all of our hopes that we've reached the end of history, we never do. this is essential reading for everyone in the West who ever wonders where the economy (whatever country you live in) is going next. straight-forward, easy to digest history that's interesting. ...then you won't be surprised when the news plays out now in this crisis the same way it's done in the past...

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Deep understanding of the world economy

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I would recommend the book because it give a great foundation to understanding the role governments have and will play in the manipulation of the world economy and gives an understanding that this has been done for thousands of years.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

No

Any additional comments?

The book really needs to be listened to with the tables and graphs available. Sometime difficult to follow without the visual representations.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Adam Smith Their Not

What did you like best about This Time Is Different? What did you like least?

The most valuable part of the book was the data. The least valuable was the analysis.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Put more thought into the analysis.

Have you listened to any of Sean Pratt???s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No

Did This Time Is Different inspire you to do anything?

No

Any additional comments?

No

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

For this topic, more useful than sight-reading.

Like a series of well-organized, excellently delivered Economics-Lectures, making technical and dense material approachable, comprehensible, interesting and, ultimately, useful.

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Unsuitable for Audio Presentation

This book is completely unsuitable for an audio format. The data is intended to be presented visually and the print is filled with graphical data. Unless you want to hear continual references to visual data that you can't see, don't buy this audio book!

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Not *that* bad as an audiobook

I have read the negative comments about the audiobook and although I can understand them I don't entirely agree. The audio is quite sufficient to present the main points of the author's arguments and these are very interesting. I will probably buy the paper book also, but the audio is no waste of money. For me it was a relatively cheap and quick way to sample the book.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Livelier accounts of the same material exist

How were the events of and leading to the financial crisis of 2008 similar to and different from other historical crises? You will find out from listening to this book but it will be painful. Much livelier accounts can be listened to or read. They are by Paul Krugman, John Cassidy, David Wessel, and others.
This book sounds like a paper being read at an economics conference. Particularly problematic for the audio format is frequent reference to figures. In fact, Audible.com should warn the potential purchaser that this is actually a very VISUAL book.
Unfortunately, the narrator signals his disengagement from the material by stopping too often in mid-sentence. He makes it hard to enjoy the dry text further desiccated by absent figures
For me, the strength of Reinhart and Rogoff's effort is that they have compiled reams of data that drive home the obvious irony of the first half of the book's title. Since markets and economies have changed so much over the last two centuries, let alone the last millenium, I was not looking for enlightenment along the lines of the second half of the title, nor was it presented other than superficially.
By comparing the crisis of 2008 and its sequelae with other crises of the 20th century, one does learn that as bad as things are, they could have been--and may still get--a lot worse. Housing prices can take a decade to bottom out. Unemployment can rise 7% or more from pre-crisis levels, and stay there half a decade. Recessions associated with financial crises are far more malignant than other recessions. And government debt rises much more from loss of tax revenue than from "bail outs" or stimulus spending.
To understand what happened in 2008 relative to textbook economics, I recommend John Cassidy's How Markets Fail. For an exciting account of the psychology of the players, Michael Lewis' The Big Short fits the bill. To sit in on the meetings in autumn, 2008, it is hard to beat Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail.

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