History Rhymes -- But Do We Learn from It?

Robert F. Bruner, dean of the University of Virginia’s Graduate School of Business and author of The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market’s Perfect Storm, writes on Forbes.com that the current financial crisis shares a number of attributes with past economic and market crises. But, he asks, “does the recurrence of crises actually mean we’ve learned little from them? More important, what can we learn from them?” Bruner says that the current crisis differs from those of the past because of its greater complexity, inflexibility, speed, and scale, and he suggests four lessons we can take from those points.