Afghanistan : A Cultural and Political History

systems. Such is not the case, and it would have been helpful for them to have explained why. Socialist monetary systems suffer chronic but hidden fi nancial imbalances. Central planners direct resources to ineffi cient uses, using the fi nancial system as a means of enforcing their dictates. When banks and other state enterprises act ineffi ciently, they do not go bankrupt, transferring control of their assets to better managers. Rather, consumers bear the consequences of their mistakes. The results are pervasive shortages of consumer goods, occasional monetary “reforms” that confi scate part of households’ fi nancial wealth, and exchange controls that make the currency almost useless for buying foreign goods. To repeat, the book should be judged more by what it does than by what it fails to do. This Time Is Different changes the way we can study fi nancial crises. It is the start of a truly comprehensive approach to the subject. It supplements the shrewd insights of previous researchers such as Charles Kindleberger (author of the popular and infl uential Manias, Panics, and Crashes), who had much less data to work with. It adds new ideas that will be useful for gauging the risk of future crises and perhaps even reducing their impact, if investors and policymakers are willing to learn from other people’s mistakes, not just their own mistakes.