No matter how hard times could get: in hindsight, everything is forgotten and hope replaces every glimpse of prudent rationality. But reading some carefully selected books is the perfect antidote to get back some good’n’old common sense:

• [amazon_link id=“1933633867” target=“_blank” ]Debt, the First 5000 Years[/amazon_link]. A history of debt through the different cultures and civilizations. Although dichotomous and highly controversial in its moral judgments, it outstandly debunks myths like the prime role of money over the debt or the dual nature of debt as an instrument of commerce and finance, and perfectly portrays the cult of personal honor as the root of the economy through the ages. You better skip most of the narrative and go directly to the more academic sources cited in the references.
• [amazon_link id=“0230365353” target=“_blank” ]Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crisis[/amazon_link]. A reference work, revered by its insights and the lasting impact of its anecdotes. Entirely literary and qualitative, it was the first to illustrate that crisis do follow predefined patterns by the carefully picked descriptions of past debacles, though it lacks a general theory of their formation and development.
• [amazon_link id=“0691152640” target=“_blank” ]This Time Is Different[/amazon_link]. It’s a wonderful masterpiece of the cliometric school, born to the power of the personal computer to carry out hundreds of regressions: contrary to the previous book, it offers a quantitative study of financial crisis over centuries and continents, a view far away from the traditional equilibrium models of the economy. Frequentist and predictive by its nature, it fails at ignoring that crisis may have roots different to a failure in the saving-to-investment mechanism that it forcibly ascribes to, even if the first 200 pages are dedicated to a fully detailed taxonomy of financial crisis.