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Abstract
In what ways can there be a learning from the past in the case of financial crises? A short-run assessment looks frequently different to a longer retrospective: policies that once appeared to be the best available turn out to be counter-productive. The article tackles this issue by examining three iconic and world-changing cases of financial crisis: 1931, 1997 and 2008. In each, it looked at first as if there was a substantial success, because the measures adopted corresponded to conventional wisdom. But those immediate responses, in each case driven by the sense that past mistakes needed to be avoided, in the end unfortunately set the stage for a new set of problems, and thus for the next crisis. Even though multilateral solutions might have been the best answer, the concrete dynamics of responding to crises politically produces national solutions, which may drive a nationalization of politics. The immediate and conventional solutions did not adequately deal with the social and political fallout from increasing disillusion with the way that the solutions are applied, and with the (in part) unintended consequences they produce. The side-effects of anti-crisis medicine are thus unpleasant and liable to generate new tensions.

AbstractThe paper examines the causal relationships and interdependence between inflation and globalisation over centuries: in the sixteenth century, in the age of Spanish silver; then in the first age of modern globalisation from in the middle of the nineteenth century; and finally in the new globalisation that took off in the 1970s. In the latter cases, inflation was a response to a negative supply shock, and eventually generated policy decisions on economic opening. Both recent globalisations may be explained as technologically driven, and some of the most important productivity gains involved the cost of transport, but the fundamental innovations substantially pre‐dated the moment at which they were economically transformative. Scarcity dramatically changes relative prices, but not the overall price level. Initially inflation became a policy solution, an attractive way of meeting the challenges of scarcity, but then its increasing costs became apparent, and more, rather than less, global integration looked like a way of reducing costs and minimising social pressure. Policy choices were involved in generating the globalised world: not only the removal of impediments to commerce, but also a consensus around a stable and internationally applicable monetary framework, whether the gold standard in the late nineteenth century or a modern inflation targeting regime in the late twentieth century.