A critical note on “This time is different”

This article is structured as follows: the first section is based on Reinhart and Rogoff’s seminal papers (Am Econ Rev 98(2):339–344, 2008a, b, Am Econ Rev 99(2):466–472, 2009a, This time is different: eight centuries of financial folly, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009b, Am Econ Rev 100(2):573–578, 2010) and text book (2009), which today constitute the new cornerstones of conventional wisdom on the recurrence of financial crises throughout History, their development and aftermath. We deliver a critical view of this attempt to infer some systematic empirical relationship between debt, growth and inflation and underline the absence of core variables in this historical analysis. In Sect. 3, we go back 10 years to illustrate that conventional wisdom was much different at that time, emphasizing the peculiarity of each episode of the financial crises. This raises the issue of the relevancy of the cliometric approach to identify regularities down through History: so, should we trust cliometricians?