This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

摘要

In the 1990s, in both the popular press and the economic literature, people seriously claimed that the business cycle was history. The so-called New Economy had arrived. This New Economy, many argued, was associated with a fundamental change in the structure of the economy that would eliminate depression and recession. The miracle bringing this about was information and communication technology. The argument was that in the virtual world created by the Internet, the efficiency and effectiveness of real economic transacting had taken a quantum leap to unprecedented heights. This was the time when Enron could move energy around by clicking a mouse, in the process virtually creating billions of dollars.