‘This time is different’: eight hundred years of financial folly

Carmen Reinhart, in work with Kenneth Rogoff, has developed a comprehensive new database spanning eight centuries for studying debt and banking crises, inflation, currency crashes and debasements. She talks to Romesh Vaitilingam about the lessons for today’s global financial crisis, noting that although we may not have seen explicit sovereign debt defaults for a while, a growing number of emerging markets are now defaulting through inflation.