Abstract

Remembering and Forgetting Financial Crises

In Firefighting, their collective memoir of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 published on its tenth anniversary, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson lament that: ‘Financial crises recur in part because memories fade’. But they do not say anything on how to prevent memory from fading. Will leaving a testimony of their action during the crisis do the trick? This paper reflects on how financial crises are actually remembered and forgotten, how their memory fades and is distorted over time. It argues that the works of economic and financial historians are not enough to understand the recurrence of financial crises and need to be complemented by concepts and analyses borrowed from memory studies. It considers why some financial crises are properly remembered, others only half-remembered, and others almost entirely forgotten. And it discusses how history and memory combine or diverge in their narratives of financial crises, with particular attention to the Great Depression, the International Debt Crisis of 1982, and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.