{ "generated": "2026-10-22", "source": "Boom, Bubble, Bust — AllHistories", "count": 42, "crises": [ { "id": "rome-33", "year": 33, "label": "33 CE", "title": "The Roman credit panic", "place": "Rome", "era": "ancient", "types": [ "banking" ], "hook": "A liquidity squeeze in the heart of the empire", "cause": "Emperor Tiberius revived an old law requiring senators to hold much of their wealth in Italian land. Creditors called in loans all at once to raise cash, and borrowers were forced to sell property into a falling market.", "trigger": "A sudden enforcement of lending rules and a wave of called-in loans.", "impact": "Land prices collapsed, debtors were ruined and money vanished from circulation. Tiberius injected 100 million sesterces into the banks as interest-free, three-year loans secured on land.", "legacy": "Often cited as the first recorded central liquidity intervention. The mechanism, a forced scramble for cash, recurs for the next two thousand years.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_33", "status": "check" }, { "id": "rome-3rd", "year": 235, "label": "235–284", "title": "Debasement of the denarius", "place": "Roman Empire", "era": "ancient", "types": [ "inflation" ], "hook": "When the coin itself stopped being trusted", "cause": "Civil war, plague and frontier wars drained the treasury. Emperors paid soldiers by reducing the silver in the denarius until it was little more than a silver-washed bronze coin.", "trigger": "Decades of political instability and military spending.", "impact": "Prices rose sharply, trade retreated toward barter in some regions, and tax collection shifted to payment in kind. Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices (301 CE) tried and failed to cap prices by decree.", "legacy": "The canonical case of monetary debasement as a hidden tax, and of price controls failing to cure inflation.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century", "status": "check" }, { "id": "bardi-1343", "year": 1343, "label": "1343–1346", "title": "Collapse of the Bardi and Peruzzi banks", "place": "Florence", "era": "medieval", "types": [ "banking", "sovereign" ], "hook": "Medieval super-companies, undone by a king's war", "cause": "Florence's great merchant banks lent enormous sums to Edward III of England to finance the opening of the Hundred Years' War, alongside heavy exposure to Naples and to Florence's own public debt.", "trigger": "Edward III stopped repaying in the early 1340s while Florence itself slid into fiscal crisis.", "impact": "The Peruzzi failed in 1343 and the Bardi in 1346, dragging down depositors across Europe. Florence suffered a prolonged slump just before the Black Death.", "legacy": "The first well-documented cross-border banking failures. Historians debate how much the English default alone explains the collapse.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnia_dei_Bardi", "status": "check" }, { "id": "black-death", "year": 1347, "label": "1347–1351", "title": "The Black Death economy", "place": "Europe and Asia", "era": "medieval", "types": [ "pandemic", "supply" ], "hook": "Not a financial panic, but the biggest economic shock of the millennium", "cause": "Plague killed roughly a third to half of Europe's population within a few years.", "trigger": "Arrival of plague in Mediterranean ports in 1347.", "impact": "Labour became scarce and wages rose; land fell in value; lords tried to freeze wages by law (England's Statute of Labourers, 1351). Trade routes and tax bases were disrupted for decades.", "legacy": "Shows that an economy can be transformed by a supply shock to people rather than to money. Long-run effects include the weakening of serfdom in western Europe.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death", "status": "check" }, { "id": "spain-1557", "year": 1557, "label": "1557–1596", "title": "Spain's serial bankruptcies", "place": "Spanish Empire", "era": "early-modern", "types": [ "sovereign" ], "hook": "The richest crown in Europe, defaulting again and again", "cause": "Philip II financed wars on several fronts with short-term loans from Genoese and German bankers, secured against future silver fleets from the Americas.", "trigger": "War spending outran silver arrivals; the crown suspended payments in 1557, 1560, 1575 and 1596.", "impact": "Each suspension forced creditors to convert short-term loans into long-term bonds at a loss. The Fugger banking house was badly damaged; Genoese financiers took over as the crown's main lenders.", "legacy": "An early lesson that even a resource-rich sovereign can become a serial defaulter when borrowing is tied to a single volatile income stream.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain", "status": "check" }, { "id": "kipper-1621", "year": 1621, "label": "1619–1623", "title": "Kipper und Wipper", "place": "Holy Roman Empire", "era": "early-modern", "types": [ "inflation", "currency" ], "hook": "Europe's first great inflation, made of clipped coins", "cause": "At the start of the Thirty Years' War, hundreds of German states debased their small coinage to raise war money. 'Kipper' (clippers) and 'Wipper' (tilters of the scales) culled good coins and re-minted them as bad ones.", "trigger": "Competitive debasement between neighbouring mints.", "impact": "Prices of bread and basic goods multiplied; riots broke out; wages and rents lagged far behind. By 1623 the debased coins were being refused outright.", "legacy": "A textbook case of a currency crisis driven by the issuers themselves, two centuries before paper money inflations.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipper_und_Wipper", "status": "check" }, { "id": "tulip-1637", "year": 1637, "label": "1636–1637", "title": "Tulip Mania", "place": "Dutch Republic", "era": "early-modern", "types": [ "bubble" ], "hook": "The most famous bubble, and the most exaggerated", "cause": "Rare, virus-striped tulip bulbs became luxury goods in a newly wealthy republic. In late 1636 trading shifted to futures contracts on bulbs still in the ground, often settled in taverns.", "trigger": "In February 1637 buyers stopped appearing at an auction in Haarlem; contract prices fell within days.", "impact": "Contracts were mostly cancelled or settled for a small fraction, and the Dutch economy carried on growing. Archival work by Anne Goldgar found few actual bankruptcies.", "legacy": "The story of ruined burghers was inflated over the centuries by moralists and later by Charles Mackay's 1841 bestseller. The bubble was real; the national catastrophe was not.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "south-sea-1720", "year": 1720, "label": "1720", "title": "The South Sea Bubble", "place": "London", "era": "early-modern", "types": [ "bubble", "sovereign" ], "hook": "How to sell a promise: a debt swap dressed as a trading empire", "cause": "The South Sea Company offered to take over Britain's national debt in exchange for shares, while talking up a near-mythical trade with Spanish America. Politicians were bribed with shares; the price rose from about £128 in January to nearly £1,000 by August.", "trigger": "Insiders sold, the Bubble Act of June 1720 choked off rival schemes, and confidence broke in September.", "impact": "The share price fell back to roughly where it had started by December. Thousands of investors, including Isaac Newton, lost heavily; the Chancellor of the Exchequer was imprisoned.", "legacy": "The Bank of England and a restructured debt survived. Britain's distrust of joint-stock companies lasted a century.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "mississippi-1720", "year": 1720, "label": "1719–1720", "title": "The Mississippi Bubble", "place": "Paris", "era": "early-modern", "types": [ "bubble", "currency" ], "hook": "John Law's experiment with paper money and a company that owned half a continent", "cause": "The Scottish financier John Law combined a note-issuing bank with the Mississippi Company, which held the trading monopoly for French Louisiana. The bank printed notes to buy company shares, whose price rose from 500 to over 10,000 livres.", "trigger": "In 1720 shareholders tried to convert gains into coin; Law restricted gold payments and the notes lost credibility.", "impact": "Shares and notes collapsed together. Law fled France; the word 'millionaire' entered the language during the boom.", "legacy": "France avoided paper money and a central bank for the rest of the century, with consequences for its public finances on the eve of the Revolution.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Company", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "amsterdam-1763", "year": 1763, "label": "1763", "title": "The Amsterdam crisis of 1763", "place": "Amsterdam", "era": "early-modern", "types": [ "banking" ], "hook": "A chain of IOUs snaps at the end of a war", "cause": "During the Seven Years' War, merchant banks financed trade with long chains of bills of exchange, each backed by another. When peace came, commodity prices fell and the chains began to break.", "trigger": "The bankruptcy of the De Neufville firm in Amsterdam in August 1763.", "impact": "Failures spread to Hamburg and Berlin within weeks. Amsterdam's banks arranged an emergency liquidity scheme to stop the panic.", "legacy": "Economists at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere have compared its structure, with highly leveraged intermediaries funded by short paper, to 2008.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_banking_crisis_of_1763", "status": "check" }, { "id": "credit-1772", "year": 1772, "label": "1772–1773", "title": "The credit crisis of 1772", "place": "London and Edinburgh", "era": "early-modern", "types": [ "banking" ], "hook": "A banker flees, an empire's credit freezes", "cause": "Easy credit from Scottish banks and London houses financed speculation in East India Company stock and colonial trade.", "trigger": "In June 1772 the banker Alexander Fordyce fled to France after losing heavily shorting East India stock. His bank failed within days.", "impact": "Twenty London banking houses stopped payment; the Ayr Bank in Scotland collapsed; the panic reached Amsterdam and the American colonies.", "legacy": "The East India Company's resulting distress led to the Tea Act of 1773, one of the sparks of the American Revolution.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_crisis_of_1772", "status": "check" }, { "id": "panic-1819", "year": 1819, "label": "1819–1821", "title": "The Panic of 1819", "place": "United States", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "banking", "bubble" ], "hook": "The young republic's first boom and bust", "cause": "Post-war demand for American cotton and grain fuelled a land boom financed by loosely regulated state banks.", "trigger": "European harvests recovered, commodity prices fell and the Second Bank of the United States abruptly tightened credit.", "impact": "Land values collapsed, banks failed and foreclosures spread across the West and South. Unemployment in cities rose sharply.", "legacy": "Created lasting American hostility toward central banking that later helped kill the Second Bank itself.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1819", "status": "check" }, { "id": "panic-1825", "year": 1825, "label": "1825–1826", "title": "The Panic of 1825", "place": "London", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "banking", "bubble" ], "hook": "Bonds for a country that did not exist", "cause": "Low interest rates and newly independent Latin American states produced a mania for foreign bonds and mining shares. One scheme sold bonds for 'Poyais', a fictional nation invented by the fraudster Gregor MacGregor.", "trigger": "Bond prices fell in late 1825 and depositors ran on provincial banks.", "impact": "Around 70 English banks failed. The Bank of England lent heavily to stop the run, an early version of lender-of-last-resort action.", "legacy": "Recent research traces how losses travelled from London through correspondent banks into ordinary provincial firms, the first modern financial contagion.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1825", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "panic-1837", "year": 1837, "label": "1837–1843", "title": "The Panic of 1837", "place": "New York", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "banking", "depression" ], "hook": "Cotton, land and a run on the banks", "cause": "A speculative boom in western land and cotton, financed by state banks and British capital.", "trigger": "The Bank of England raised rates, cotton prices fell and the US Treasury's 1836 Specie Circular demanded gold for land purchases. New York banks suspended specie payments in May 1837.", "impact": "Hundreds of banks failed, several states defaulted on their bonds and a depression lasted into the 1840s.", "legacy": "One of the deepest downturns in US history before 1929, and a reminder that nineteenth-century America was already a debtor nation exposed to London.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837", "status": "check" }, { "id": "panic-1857", "year": 1857, "label": "1857–1858", "title": "The Panic of 1857", "place": "New York", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "banking" ], "hook": "The first crisis to travel by telegraph", "cause": "Railroad over-investment, falling grain prices after the Crimean War and heavy borrowing from Europe.", "trigger": "The failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company in August 1857, followed by the loss of the gold-laden SS Central America.", "impact": "Banks suspended payment across the United States; the panic spread to Britain, Germany and Scandinavia within weeks.", "legacy": "Often called the first worldwide economic crisis. Telegraph news accelerated the loss of confidence.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1857", "status": "check" }, { "id": "overend-1866", "year": 1866, "label": "1866", "title": "Overend, Gurney and Company", "place": "London", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "banking" ], "hook": "The failure that wrote the rulebook for central banks", "cause": "The City's largest discount house drifted from safe bill-discounting into long-term loans to shipping and railway ventures, then converted into a limited company to hide its losses.", "trigger": "The firm stopped payment on 10 May 1866, 'Black Friday'.", "impact": "Panic swept Lombard Street; over 200 companies failed. The Bank of England lent freely at a penalty rate and the panic subsided within weeks.", "legacy": "Walter Bagehot's 'Lombard Street' (1873) turned the episode into a rule: in a panic, lend freely, at a high rate, against good collateral.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overend,_Gurney_and_Company", "status": "check" }, { "id": "panic-1873", "year": 1873, "label": "1873–1879", "title": "The Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression", "place": "Vienna and New York", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "banking", "depression" ], "hook": "Railroads built on paper, in two hemispheres", "cause": "A post-war building boom in Germany and Austria and railroad speculation in the United States, financed by bonds that could not pay their way.", "trigger": "The Vienna Stock Exchange crashed in May 1873; the US bank Jay Cooke & Company, financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad, failed in September.", "impact": "The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days. The US recession ran from October 1873 to March 1879, the longest contraction in NBER records.", "legacy": "Decades of deflation and slow growth across the industrial world, remembered as the Great Depression until 1929 took the name.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "baring-1890", "year": 1890, "label": "1890", "title": "The Baring crisis", "place": "London and Buenos Aires", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "sovereign", "banking" ], "hook": "A bank too important to fail, in 1890", "cause": "Barings, one of London's oldest merchant banks, had underwritten huge volumes of Argentine bonds and could not sell them when Argentina's economy turned.", "trigger": "Argentina approached default in 1890 and Barings was left holding unsaleable paper.", "impact": "The Bank of England organised a guarantee fund with other banks to wind Barings down in an orderly way, preventing a wider panic. Argentina suffered a deep recession.", "legacy": "The first coordinated rescue of a systemically important institution. Barings survived another 105 years, until a rogue trader broke it in 1995.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1890", "status": "check" }, { "id": "panic-1893", "year": 1893, "label": "1893–1897", "title": "The Panic of 1893", "place": "United States", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "banking", "depression" ], "hook": "Gold, silver and railroads", "cause": "Railroad over-building, a weakening gold reserve under silver-purchase laws and falling farm prices.", "trigger": "The failure of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in February 1893, followed by a run on gold at the Treasury.", "impact": "Some 500 banks and 15,000 businesses failed; unemployment is estimated to have exceeded 10 percent for years.", "legacy": "Fuelled the populist 'free silver' movement and the gold-standard politics of the 1896 election.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893", "status": "check" }, { "id": "panic-1907", "year": 1907, "label": "1907", "title": "The Panic of 1907", "place": "New York", "era": "industrial", "types": [ "banking" ], "hook": "The run that created the Federal Reserve", "cause": "Lightly regulated trust companies had grown fast on risky lending, with far thinner cash reserves than banks and no access to the clearing-house safety net.", "trigger": "A failed attempt to corner United Copper stock in October 1907 brought down the brokers and banks linked to it, and depositors ran on the Knickerbocker Trust.", "impact": "J. P. Morgan personally organised rescues and locked bankers in his library until they agreed to a liquidity pool. The stock market fell by half from its 1906 peak.", "legacy": "Congress concluded that the country could not rely on one private banker. The Federal Reserve Act followed in 1913.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "weimar-1923", "year": 1923, "label": "1921–1923", "title": "Weimar hyperinflation", "place": "Germany", "era": "modern", "types": [ "inflation", "currency" ], "hook": "Wheelbarrows of banknotes", "cause": "Germany financed the war and then reparations by printing money rather than taxing. When France occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, the government paid striking workers with yet more notes.", "trigger": "The Ruhr occupation and the collapse of confidence in the paper mark.", "impact": "By November 1923 one US dollar bought about 4.2 trillion marks. Savings, pensions and bond holdings were wiped out; prices changed by the hour.", "legacy": "The Rentenmark stabilised the currency within months, but the destruction of middle-class savings became a lasting political wound.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "great-depression", "year": 1929, "label": "1929–1939", "title": "The Great Depression", "place": "New York, then the world", "era": "modern", "types": [ "depression", "banking", "bubble" ], "hook": "A crash is not the whole catastrophe", "cause": "A stock boom financed on margin, a fragile banking system of thousands of small banks, a gold standard that transmitted deflation between countries, and a central bank that let the money supply shrink.", "trigger": "The Wall Street crash of 24–29 October 1929. The Dow eventually fell 89 percent from its peak by July 1932.", "impact": "Roughly 9,000 US banks failed between 1930 and 1933. US output fell by about a quarter and unemployment reached about 25 percent. Germany's slump helped bring the Nazis to power; world trade collapsed under tariff walls.", "legacy": "Deposit insurance, securities regulation, the separation of commercial and investment banking, and the modern idea that governments must fight depressions.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "oil-1973", "year": 1973, "label": "1973–1975", "title": "The first oil shock", "place": "Middle East and the West", "era": "modern", "types": [ "supply", "inflation" ], "hook": "The price of energy rewrites the economy", "cause": "Western economies had built decades of growth on cheap imported oil.", "trigger": "Arab OPEC members embargoed oil exports to supporters of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, October 1973. Prices roughly quadrupled within months.", "impact": "Fuel rationing, speed limits and Sunday driving bans; a deep recession in 1973–75 combined with double-digit inflation, a mix economists had thought impossible.", "legacy": "'Stagflation' entered the vocabulary. The shock drove energy policy, nuclear programmes and the end of the post-war boom.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "volcker-1980", "year": 1980, "label": "1979–1982", "title": "The second oil shock and the Volcker recession", "place": "United States and Europe", "era": "modern", "types": [ "supply", "inflation" ], "hook": "Breaking inflation on purpose", "cause": "The Iranian Revolution of 1979 cut oil supply again just as inflation in the West was running near 13 percent.", "trigger": "Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker raised interest rates toward 20 percent to stop inflation.", "impact": "A sharp double-dip recession; US unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent in late 1982, the highest since the 1930s. Farm and industrial regions were hit hardest.", "legacy": "Inflation fell to about 3 percent by 1983. The episode established the modern doctrine of independent, inflation-fighting central banks.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession", "status": "check" }, { "id": "latam-1982", "year": 1982, "label": "1982–1989", "title": "The Latin American debt crisis", "place": "Mexico City and the region", "era": "modern", "types": [ "sovereign", "currency" ], "hook": "The lost decade", "cause": "During the 1970s, Latin American governments borrowed heavily in dollars from Western banks flush with petrodollars.", "trigger": "US interest rates soared and commodity prices fell. In August 1982 Mexico announced it could not service its debt.", "impact": "Sixteen countries followed into restructuring. Austerity programmes, currency collapses and falling living standards marked a 'lost decade' across the region.", "legacy": "The Brady Plan of 1989 turned bank loans into tradable bonds, creating the modern emerging-market debt market.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_debt_crisis", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "sl-1986", "year": 1986, "label": "1986–1995", "title": "The savings and loan crisis", "place": "United States", "era": "modern", "types": [ "banking" ], "hook": "Deregulation meets real-estate speculation", "cause": "Thrifts that had been locked into low-rate mortgages were freed to chase high-yield commercial real estate and junk bonds, with deposits still insured by the taxpayer.", "trigger": "Falling oil prices and property values in Texas and the Southwest exposed the bad loans.", "impact": "More than 1,000 savings and loan institutions failed; the cleanup cost taxpayers roughly $124 billion.", "legacy": "A warning about moral hazard: insured deposits plus loose supervision invite gambling with other people's money.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis", "status": "check" }, { "id": "black-monday-1987", "year": 1987, "label": "19 October 1987", "title": "Black Monday", "place": "New York and world markets", "era": "modern", "types": [ "bubble" ], "hook": "The market falls 22.6 percent in a single day", "cause": "A long bull market, rising rates, a widening US trade deficit and 'portfolio insurance' strategies that sold futures automatically as prices fell.", "trigger": "Selling that began in Hong Kong and London on Monday morning fed on itself in New York.", "impact": "The Dow fell 508 points, 22.6 percent, the largest one-day percentage drop in its history. Yet there was no recession; the economy grew in 1988.", "legacy": "Circuit breakers that halt trading in extreme falls, and the lesson that a market crash and an economic collapse are not the same thing.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "japan-1990", "year": 1990, "label": "1986–1991", "title": "Japan's asset bubble", "place": "Tokyo", "era": "modern", "types": [ "bubble", "banking" ], "hook": "When the land under the Imperial Palace was worth more than California", "cause": "Cheap money after the 1985 Plaza Accord flowed into property and shares. The Nikkei peaked at 38,957 in December 1989; Tokyo land prices roughly tripled.", "trigger": "The Bank of Japan raised rates in 1989–90 and tightened lending to property.", "impact": "Shares and land fell for over a decade. Banks hid bad loans, growth stalled and deflation set in: the 'lost decades'. The Nikkei did not regain its 1989 peak until February 2024.", "legacy": "The model case of a balance-sheet recession, where households and firms repay debt instead of spending, however low rates go.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "black-wednesday-1992", "year": 1992, "label": "16 September 1992", "title": "Black Wednesday", "place": "London", "era": "modern", "types": [ "currency" ], "hook": "The day the pound lost to the speculators", "cause": "Britain had pegged sterling to the German mark inside the European Exchange Rate Mechanism at a rate many thought too high, while German rates stayed high after reunification.", "trigger": "Speculators led by George Soros's fund sold sterling en masse. The Bank of England raised rates to 15 percent in one day and spent billions in reserves.", "impact": "By evening Britain left the ERM and the pound fell sharply. The Treasury later estimated the cost at about £3.3 billion.", "legacy": "Sterling's exit was followed by a long expansion, and Britain never joined the euro.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "tequila-1994", "year": 1994, "label": "1994–1995", "title": "The Mexican peso crisis", "place": "Mexico City", "era": "modern", "types": [ "currency", "sovereign" ], "hook": "The Tequila crisis", "cause": "A crawling peg against the dollar, a large current-account deficit and short-term dollar-linked government debt (tesobonos) held by foreign investors.", "trigger": "Political shocks in 1994 and rising US rates; the government devalued in December 1994 and reserves ran out within days.", "impact": "The peso lost about half its value, output fell around 6 percent in 1995, and the United States and IMF assembled a $50 billion support package.", "legacy": "The first crisis of the globalised capital-flow era and a template for the emergency packages of 1997–98.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_peso_crisis", "status": "check" }, { "id": "asia-1997", "year": 1997, "label": "1997–1998", "title": "The Asian financial crisis", "place": "Bangkok, Jakarta, Seoul", "era": "modern", "types": [ "currency", "banking" ], "hook": "A currency shock becomes a regional collapse", "cause": "Fast-growing economies with pegged currencies borrowed short-term in dollars to fund long-term projects at home. Property and bank balance sheets were overstretched.", "trigger": "Thailand floated the baht on 2 July 1997 after exhausting its reserves defending the peg.", "impact": "Currencies fell by half or more in Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea; dollar debts doubled overnight in local terms. Indonesia's GDP fell 13 percent in 1998 and its government fell.", "legacy": "Asian economies built huge reserve cushions afterwards. The IMF's austerity prescriptions were widely criticised.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "russia-1998", "year": 1998, "label": "1998", "title": "The Russian default and LTCM", "place": "Moscow and Greenwich, Connecticut", "era": "modern", "types": [ "sovereign", "currency" ], "hook": "A default in Moscow nearly breaks Wall Street", "cause": "Russia funded its deficit with high-yield short-term bonds (GKOs) while oil prices fell and the Asian crisis spooked investors.", "trigger": "On 17 August 1998 Russia devalued the rouble and defaulted on domestic debt.", "impact": "Global risk premiums jumped. Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund run by Nobel laureates with leverage of about 25 to 1, lost billions in weeks and was rescued by a Fed-brokered consortium.", "legacy": "A demonstration that models calibrated to calm markets fail in panics, and that a single leveraged fund can threaten the system.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Russian_financial_crisis", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "dotcom-2000", "year": 2000, "label": "2000–2002", "title": "The dot-com bust", "place": "San Francisco and Nasdaq", "era": "modern", "types": [ "bubble" ], "hook": "The future was real. The valuations were not.", "cause": "Investors paid almost any price for internet companies with no profits, financed by a flood of IPOs and venture money.", "trigger": "The Nasdaq peaked at 5,048 on 10 March 2000; rate rises and a string of failed start-ups turned sentiment.", "impact": "The Nasdaq fell 78 percent by October 2002 and did not regain its peak until 2015. The US recession of 2001 was mild, but trillions in paper wealth vanished.", "legacy": "Amazon and Google survived; Pets.com did not. The technology was real even when the share prices were not.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "argentina-2001", "year": 2001, "label": "1998–2002", "title": "Argentina's great depression", "place": "Buenos Aires", "era": "modern", "types": [ "sovereign", "currency", "depression" ], "hook": "The largest sovereign default in history, at the time", "cause": "A one-to-one peg of the peso to the dollar, adopted to kill inflation in 1991, left Argentina unable to devalue as Brazil's currency fell and debt piled up.", "trigger": "A run on the banks in late 2001 led to the 'corralito' freeze on withdrawals; riots forced the president out in December.", "impact": "Argentina defaulted on about $93 billion, ended the peg and saw the peso lose three-quarters of its value. Output fell about 11 percent in 2002 and over half the population fell into poverty.", "legacy": "A cautionary tale about hard currency pegs, and a two-decade legal saga with holdout creditors.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998%E2%80%932002_Argentine_great_depression", "status": "check" }, { "id": "gfc-2008", "year": 2008, "label": "2007–2009", "title": "The global financial crisis", "place": "New York, then everywhere", "era": "modern", "types": [ "banking", "bubble", "depression" ], "hook": "How one mortgage became everyone's problem", "cause": "A US housing boom financed by subprime mortgages that were packaged into securities, rated as safe and bought by leveraged banks worldwide, funded with overnight borrowing.", "trigger": "House prices fell from 2006; Bear Stearns was rescued in March 2008 and Lehman Brothers failed on 15 September 2008.", "impact": "Credit markets froze. The S&P 500 fell 57 percent; US unemployment hit 10 percent; world trade fell by double digits in 2009. Governments spent trillions on bank rescues and stimulus.", "legacy": "Basel III capital rules, Dodd-Frank, a decade of near-zero interest rates and a lasting loss of trust in finance.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_financial_crisis", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "iceland-2008", "year": 2008, "label": "2008–2011", "title": "Iceland's banking collapse", "place": "Reykjavík", "era": "modern", "types": [ "banking", "currency" ], "hook": "Three banks, ten times the size of their country", "cause": "Iceland's newly privatised banks expanded abroad until their assets reached about ten times national GDP, funded by foreign wholesale markets and internet deposits.", "trigger": "Global funding dried up in October 2008 and all three major banks failed within a week.", "impact": "The króna lost half its value, capital controls were imposed and the government fell. Iceland let the banks fail rather than rescue them and prosecuted several bankers.", "legacy": "The clearest case of a banking system outgrowing the state that stood behind it.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_financial_crisis", "status": "check" }, { "id": "zimbabwe-2008", "year": 2008, "label": "2007–2009", "title": "Zimbabwe's hyperinflation", "place": "Harare", "era": "modern", "types": [ "inflation", "currency" ], "hook": "The hundred-trillion-dollar banknote", "cause": "Collapsing farm output after land seizures, falling exports and a government printing money to cover its deficit.", "trigger": "Monthly inflation went exponential during 2008.", "impact": "Inflation in November 2008 is estimated at about 79.6 billion percent per month. Shops repriced several times a day; the 100-trillion-dollar note was issued in January 2009.", "legacy": "Zimbabwe abandoned its currency in 2009 and adopted the US dollar. The note is now a collector's item.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "euro-2010", "year": 2010, "label": "2010–2015", "title": "The eurozone debt crisis", "place": "Athens, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid", "era": "modern", "types": [ "sovereign", "banking" ], "hook": "Sovereign debt inside a currency you cannot print", "cause": "Countries sharing the euro had borrowed at near-German rates for a decade. Greece had understated its deficits; Ireland and Spain had property bubbles whose bank losses landed on the state.", "trigger": "Greece's revised deficit figures in late 2009 sent its bond yields soaring; the first bailout came in May 2010.", "impact": "Bailouts for Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus; Greek output fell by a quarter and youth unemployment passed 50 percent. The euro itself seemed at risk until Mario Draghi promised 'whatever it takes' in July 2012.", "legacy": "A banking union and a permanent rescue fund, and a lasting north-south political rift in Europe.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_debt_crisis", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "covid-2020", "year": 2020, "label": "2020", "title": "The COVID-19 shock", "place": "Global", "era": "modern", "types": [ "pandemic", "supply" ], "hook": "The crisis that needed no bubble", "cause": "A pandemic forced governments and households to halt travel, services and much of production at the same moment worldwide.", "trigger": "Lockdowns spread from China to Europe and the Americas in March 2020.", "impact": "The S&P 500 fell 34 percent in 33 days. The US lost about 22 million jobs in two months and unemployment hit 14.7 percent. The US recession lasted two months, the shortest on record, thanks to unprecedented fiscal and monetary support.", "legacy": "Proof that an economy can be stopped by a health emergency, and that the rebound depends on how much income is replaced.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_recession", "status": "ok" }, { "id": "inflation-2022", "year": 2022, "label": "2021–2023", "title": "The post-pandemic inflation surge", "place": "Global", "era": "modern", "types": [ "inflation", "supply" ], "hook": "Prices surge from the supply side", "cause": "Reopening demand met snarled supply chains, then Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent energy and food prices soaring.", "trigger": "Energy prices and shipping bottlenecks during 2021–22.", "impact": "US consumer inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and euro-area inflation at 10.6 percent; central banks raised rates at the fastest pace in four decades.", "legacy": "The first broad inflation in advanced economies since the 1980s, and a reminder that supply shocks, not just bubbles, cause crises.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932023_inflation_surge", "status": "check" }, { "id": "srilanka-2022", "year": 2022, "label": "2019–2022", "title": "Sri Lanka's debt crisis", "place": "Colombo", "era": "modern", "types": [ "sovereign", "currency" ], "hook": "When a country runs out of foreign currency", "cause": "Heavy foreign borrowing, tax cuts in 2019, the collapse of tourism in the pandemic and a sudden ban on chemical fertiliser that cut harvests.", "trigger": "Foreign reserves ran out in early 2022; Sri Lanka defaulted in May, its first default since independence.", "impact": "Days-long queues for fuel, power cuts and shortages of medicine. Mass protests forced the president to flee in July 2022.", "legacy": "A modern template for how a currency shortage becomes a shortage of everything.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_economic_crisis_(2019%E2%80%93present)", "status": "check" }, { "id": "svb-2023", "year": 2023, "label": "March 2023", "title": "The US regional banking turmoil", "place": "Santa Clara and Zürich", "era": "modern", "types": [ "banking" ], "hook": "A bank run at smartphone speed", "cause": "Silicon Valley Bank had parked a flood of deposits in long-term bonds; rising interest rates slashed their value, and most of its deposits were uninsured and concentrated in one industry.", "trigger": "Depositors withdrew $42 billion in a single day, 9 March 2023, coordinated over social media. The bank failed the next morning.", "impact": "Signature Bank and First Republic followed; regulators guaranteed all deposits. In Switzerland, Credit Suisse was forced into a takeover by UBS within the same fortnight.", "legacy": "A reminder that interest-rate risk and digital banking can turn a run from a queue outside into a few taps on a screen.", "wiki": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_States_banking_crisis", "status": "check" } ] }