# Boom, Bubble, Bust — Economic Crises Through History
## Research file for the AllHistories microsite

**Prepared:** 22 October 2026
**Scope:** Market crashes, bank panics, sovereign defaults, currency and inflation crises, supply shocks and depressions from the Roman credit panic of 33 CE to the US regional-bank runs of 2023.
**Status:** Curated research synthesis for an editorial microsite. 42 episodes are summarised below; each carries a status. *Verified* means the summary rests on the institutional sources listed in section 7. *To check* means the summary is drawn from encyclopedic sources (chiefly Wikipedia and Britannica) and needs case-specific scholarly review before numeric charts are built on it.

This file supersedes the earlier ChatGPT research blueprint (22 October 2026), which it absorbs and extends: 12 further episodes, a settled visual identity, the figures used in every chart with their sources, and an explicit observed / estimated / illustrative label for each number on the page.

---

## 1. Editorial concept

**Title:** Boom, Bubble, Bust
**Line:** Every generation believes it has learned the lesson. Then prices rise, debts pile up, and a promise somewhere has to break.
**Central question:** Why do people repeatedly turn prosperity into vulnerability, and why do some shocks become global catastrophes while others stay contained?

The site keeps a strict distinction between a **market crash** (an asset-price move), a **banking crisis** (systemic distress among lenders), a **currency crisis**, a **sovereign debt crisis**, an **inflationary shock**, a **supply shock**, a **recession** (a broad fall in activity) and a **depression** (a severe, prolonged one). They overlap but are not synonyms: Black Monday 1987 was a crash without a recession; COVID-19 was a recession without a bubble.

### The visual symbol: the Broken Cycle

A ring (the economic cycle) with a gap at the top right. Inside it, an amber line climbs in steps toward the gap, then a red line falls almost vertically to a single point. The ring says *cycle*; the gap says *the moment the cycle breaks*; the amber and red lines say *boom* and *bust* in the two colours used for those ideas throughout the site. Recovery is the third colour, teal, used for the response stage, the trough-to-expansion part of the wave, and anything about repair.

Files: `logo.svg` (on a dark rounded tile, for favicons and social cards) and `logo-mark.svg` (transparent, for use on any background).

### Chapter structure

1. **Anatomy of a bubble** — scroll-driven seven-stage curve (displacement, easy credit, euphoria, warning signs, trigger, panic, response). Based on the Kindleberger–Minsky sequence. Labelled as illustrative.
2. **Why crises happen** — eight recurring mechanisms with historical examples.
3. **Timeline** — 42 crises on a compressed era bar plus filterable cards; each card opens a four-part story (what built up, what broke it, who paid, what it changed) with its Wikipedia link and status.
4. **Compare** — 1929 vs 2008 vs 2020 on four independent measures, plus a scatter of six US stock-market drawdowns by depth and years to recover.
5. **Crisis lab** — two teaching models: the leverage trap and the bank run (liquidity versus solvency).
6. **Contagion** — a real world map (Natural Earth 110m land, Natural Earth I projection) with six selectable crises and schematic arcs along documented channels.
7. **People, not markets** — six human-cost figures with sources.
8. **Myth or reality** — six flip cards.
9. **The economic cycle** — conceptual wave plus five schools of thought (Minsky, Fisher, Keynes, supply shocks, Kondratiev).
10. **Sources and method.**

---

## 2. Why crises happen: the recurring mechanisms

| Mechanism | What it does | Illustrations |
|---|---|---|
| Speculative feedback | Rising prices attract buyers whose buying raises prices | Tulips 1637, South Sea 1720, Dot-com 2000 |
| Leverage | Borrowing multiplies gains and losses; margin calls force sales | 1929 margin, 2007 mortgages, LTCM 1998 |
| Maturity mismatch | Institutions owe cash today, own assets that sell slowly | 1907 trusts, 1763 Amsterdam, SVB 2023 |
| Currency mismatch | Debts in foreign currency balloon after devaluation | Asia 1997, Mexico 1994, Argentina 2001 |
| Sovereign over-borrowing | Refinancing stops; a state cannot pay | Spain 1557–96, Latin America 1982, Greece 2010 |
| Supply shock | An essential input becomes scarce; prices rise while output falls | Black Death, oil 1973, COVID 2020, energy 2022 |
| Debt deflation | Falling prices raise the real burden of debt (Fisher) | 1873–79, 1930–33, Japan 1990s |
| Contagion | Losses and fear travel through loans, trade and portfolios | 1825, 1857, 1997, 2008 |

A **trigger** is not a **cause**. The failure of Knickerbocker Trust in 1907 or Lehman Brothers in 2008 exposed vulnerabilities that had been built over years.

## 3. What an economic cycle is, and is not

Business cycles alternate expansion → peak → contraction → trough → expansion. The NBER dates US turning points from economy-wide activity, not a fixed two-quarter rule. A trough is where the economy stops falling, not where jobs or living standards return. US expansions have lasted from 12 months (1980–81) to 128 months (2009–20), which is why "a crisis every seven years" is folklore.

Theories presented on the site, deliberately non-dogmatically: credit cycle (Minsky), debt deflation (Fisher), demand shortfall (Keynes), supply shocks, and long waves (Kondratiev, flagged as contested and useless for prediction).

---

## 4. The 42 episodes

Status key: **verified** = rests on institutional sources in section 7; **to check** = encyclopedic summary, needs case-specific review before building numeric charts.

| Period | Episode | Place | Type | What built up → what broke it | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33 CE | The Roman credit panic | Rome | banking | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_33) |
| 235–284 | Debasement of the denarius | Roman Empire | inflation | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century) |
| 1343–1346 | Collapse of the Bardi and Peruzzi banks | Florence | banking, sovereign debt | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnia_dei_Bardi) |
| 1347–1351 | The Black Death economy | Europe and Asia | pandemic, supply shock | Plague killed roughly a third to half of Europe's population within a few years. **Trigger:** Arrival of plague in Mediterranean ports in 1347. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death) |
| 1557–1596 | Spain's serial bankruptcies | Spanish Empire | sovereign debt | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain) |
| 1619–1623 | Kipper und Wipper | Holy Roman Empire | inflation, currency | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipper_und_Wipper) |
| 1636–1637 | Tulip Mania | Dutch Republic | bubble | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) |
| 1720 | The South Sea Bubble | London | bubble, sovereign debt | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company) |
| 1719–1720 | The Mississippi Bubble | Paris | bubble, currency | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Company) |
| 1763 | The Amsterdam crisis of 1763 | Amsterdam | banking | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_banking_crisis_of_1763) |
| 1772–1773 | The credit crisis of 1772 | London and Edinburgh | banking | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_crisis_of_1772) |
| 1819–1821 | The Panic of 1819 | United States | banking, bubble | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1819) |
| 1825–1826 | The Panic of 1825 | London | banking, bubble | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1825) |
| 1837–1843 | The Panic of 1837 | New York | banking, depression | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837) |
| 1857–1858 | The Panic of 1857 | New York | banking | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1857) |
| 1866 | Overend, Gurney and Company | London | banking | 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'. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overend,_Gurney_and_Company) |
| 1873–1879 | The Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression | Vienna and New York | banking, depression | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873) |
| 1890 | The Baring crisis | London and Buenos Aires | sovereign debt, banking | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1890) |
| 1893–1897 | The Panic of 1893 | United States | banking, depression | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893) |
| 1907 | The Panic of 1907 | New York | banking | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907) |
| 1921–1923 | Weimar hyperinflation | Germany | inflation, currency | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic) |
| 1929–1939 | The Great Depression | New York, then the world | depression, banking, bubble | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression) |
| 1973–1975 | The first oil shock | Middle East and the West | supply shock, inflation | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis) |
| 1979–1982 | The second oil shock and the Volcker recession | United States and Europe | supply shock, inflation | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession) |
| 1982–1989 | The Latin American debt crisis | Mexico City and the region | sovereign debt, currency | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_debt_crisis) |
| 1986–1995 | The savings and loan crisis | United States | banking | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis) |
| 19 October 1987 | Black Monday | New York and world markets | bubble | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)) |
| 1986–1991 | Japan's asset bubble | Tokyo | bubble, banking | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble) |
| 16 September 1992 | Black Wednesday | London | currency | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday) |
| 1994–1995 | The Mexican peso crisis | Mexico City | currency, sovereign debt | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_peso_crisis) |
| 1997–1998 | The Asian financial crisis | Bangkok, Jakarta, Seoul | currency, banking | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis) |
| 1998 | The Russian default and LTCM | Moscow and Greenwich, Connecticut | sovereign debt, currency | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Russian_financial_crisis) |
| 2000–2002 | The dot-com bust | San Francisco and Nasdaq | bubble | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble) |
| 1998–2002 | Argentina's great depression | Buenos Aires | sovereign debt, currency, depression | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998%E2%80%932002_Argentine_great_depression) |
| 2007–2009 | The global financial crisis | New York, then everywhere | banking, bubble, depression | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_financial_crisis) |
| 2008–2011 | Iceland's banking collapse | Reykjavík | banking, currency | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_financial_crisis) |
| 2007–2009 | Zimbabwe's hyperinflation | Harare | inflation, currency | Collapsing farm output after land seizures, falling exports and a government printing money to cover its deficit. **Trigger:** Monthly inflation went exponential during 2008. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe) |
| 2010–2015 | The eurozone debt crisis | Athens, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid | sovereign debt, banking | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_debt_crisis) |
| 2020 | The COVID-19 shock | Global | pandemic, supply shock | 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. | verified | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_recession) |
| 2021–2023 | The post-pandemic inflation surge | Global | inflation, supply shock | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932023_inflation_surge) |
| 2019–2022 | Sri Lanka's debt crisis | Colombo | sovereign debt, currency | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_economic_crisis_(2019%E2%80%93present)) |
| March 2023 | The US regional banking turmoil | Santa Clara and Zürich | banking | 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. | to check | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_States_banking_crisis) |

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## 5. Figures used on the page, with sources and labels

### Compare chapter (United States)

| Measure | 1929 | 2008 | 2020 | Label | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recession length, peak to trough | 43 months (Aug 1929–Mar 1933) | 18 months (Dec 2007–Jun 2009) | 2 months (Feb–Apr 2020) | observed | NBER [S1] |
| Peak unemployment | ~25% (1933) | 10.0% (Oct 2009) | 14.7% (Apr 2020) | 1933 estimated; others observed | Federal Reserve History [S2]; BLS [S11] |
| Fall in real output, peak to trough | ~26% (1929–33) | 4.3% (2007Q4–2009Q2) | ~10% (2019Q4–2020Q2) | observed, rounded | BEA [S12]; Fed History cites ~30% for a broader measure |
| Stock drawdown | 89% (DJIA, Sep 1929–Jul 1932) | 57% (S&P 500, Oct 2007–Mar 2009) | 34% (S&P 500, 19 Feb–23 Mar 2020) | observed index levels | Index histories via FRED [S13] |

### Drawdown scatter (US indices, nominal, price only)

| Episode | Index | Fall | Previous peak regained | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1929 | Dow Jones | −89% | November 1954 | ~25 |
| 1973 | S&P 500 | −48% | July 1980 | ~7.5 |
| 1987 | S&P 500 | −34% (Aug–Dec 1987) | July 1989 | ~1.9 |
| 2000 | Nasdaq Composite | −78% | April 2015 | ~15 |
| 2007 | S&P 500 | −57% | March 2013 | ~5.4 |
| 2020 | S&P 500 | −34% in 33 days | August 2020 | ~0.45 |

### Human-cost chapter

| Figure | Value | Label | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| US unemployment 1933 | ~25% | estimate (reconstructed series) | Federal Reserve History [S2] |
| US bank failures 1930–33 | ~9,000 | observed | Federal Reserve History [S2] |
| Marks per US dollar, Nov 1923 | ~4.2 trillion | observed | Weimar hyperinflation literature |
| US jobs lost, Mar–Apr 2020 | ~22 million | observed (payroll employment) | BLS [S11] |
| Argentines below poverty line, 2002 | >50% | observed (INDEC urban survey) | INDEC |
| Zimbabwe monthly inflation, Nov 2008 | ~79.6 billion % | estimate (Hanke & Kwok, Cato) | Cato Institute |

### Ticker figures
South Sea share price ~£128 (Jan 1720) → ~£1,000 (Aug) → ~£124 (Dec); Panic of 1825 ~70 English bank failures; Long Depression 65 months (NBER, Oct 1873–Mar 1879); oil roughly ×4 in 1973–74 (Fed History [S5]); US CPI 9.1% June 2022 (BLS); SVB $42 billion withdrawn on 9 March 2023 (California DFPI order).

### Illustrative, not data
The anatomy curve, the economic-cycle wave, the contagion arcs and the bank-run / leverage models are teaching illustrations and are labelled as such on the page.

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## 6. Evidence policy

- Each figure on the page is labelled observed, estimated or illustrative.
- National accounts do not exist for antiquity or early-modern Europe; the site never plots "GDP losses since Rome".
- The era bar compresses time (five eras of equal width) so early episodes remain visible; it is labelled as not to scale.
- Map arcs follow documented channels (bond markets, correspondent banking, currency pegs, securitised debt, lockdowns) but are not measured capital flows.
- Famous bubbles are famous partly because storytellers kept them; the tulip card uses Goldgar's archival reassessment rather than Mackay's 1841 account.
- Reconstructed "lives" are avoided; the human-cost chapter uses sourced aggregate figures instead of invented diaries.

---

## 7. Sources

- **[S1]** NBER, *US Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions*, https://www.nber.org/research/data/us-business-cycle-expansions-and-contractions
- **[S2]** Federal Reserve History, *The Great Depression*, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-depression
- **[S3]** Federal Reserve History, *The Panic of 1907*, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/panic-of-1907
- **[S4]** Federal Reserve History, *Stock Market Crash of 1987*, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/stock-market-crash-of-1987
- **[S5]** Federal Reserve History, *Oil Shock of 1973–74*, https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/oil-shock-of-1973-74
- **[S6]** Bank of England, *History*, https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/history
- **[S7]** Anne Goldgar, *Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age* (University of Chicago Press, 2007), https://www.si.edu/object/siris_sil_903815
- **[S8]** Sean Fulmer, *United Kingdom: Bank of England Lending during the Panic of 1825*, Journal of Financial Crises 4(2), 2022, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/journal-of-financial-crises/vol4/iss2/47/
- **[S9]** IMF, *World Economic Outlook, April 2020: The Great Lockdown*, https://www.imf.org/en/publications/weo/issues/2020/04/14/world-economic-outlook-april-2020-the-great-lockdown-49306
- **[S10]** Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia, *Systemic Banking Crises Database: 1970–2025*, IMF Working Paper, 2026, https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2026/05/14/systemic-banking-crises-database-1970-2025-576036
- **[S11]** US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, https://www.bls.gov/cps/
- **[S12]** US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gross Domestic Product, https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product
- **[S13]** FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
- **[S14]** Wikipedia, *List of economic crises* and the article linked from each card, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_economic_crises
- **[S15]** Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber, *Manias, Panics and Crashes* (7th ed., 2015) — framework for the seven-stage anatomy.
- **[S16]** Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, *This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly* (2009) — sovereign default chronology.
- **[S17]** Edwin S. Hunt, *The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence* (1994) — revisionist account of the 1340s failures.
- **[S18]** Steve H. Hanke and Alex K. F. Kwok, *On the Measurement of Zimbabwe's Hyperinflation*, Cato Journal 29(2), 2009.
- **[S19]** Natural Earth (via the `world-atlas` package, 110m land) — map geometry.

### Datasets for the next phase
FRED (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/), World Bank Open Data (https://data.worldbank.org/), IMF Data (https://www.imf.org/en/Data), BIS Statistics (https://www.bis.org/statistics/), Maddison Project Database (https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/), Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/).

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## 8. Production plan

**Phase 1 (this build):** animated landing page, 42 curated crises with stories and links, anatomy scrollytelling, comparison and drawdown charts, two labs, six contagion maps, myths, cycle explainer, full source list.

**Phase 2:** grow to 60–80 episodes; import real time series for 1929, 1973, 1987, 1997, 2008 and 2020 and chart them with units; per-crisis pages with deep links; country filter on the map; translate the cards into the AllHistories event JSON format with Wikipedia attribution per event.

**Phase 3:** year-by-year contagion networks from the Laeven–Valencia database, people's stories from documented sources (diaries, oral histories, newspapers), historical prices and wages, cross-links to the country sites in the AllHistories network.