It’s been three years since the subprime mortgage market fell apart and the financial crisis started to gain steam. Shouldn’t things be looking up by now? No, according to a new study of more than a dozen financial crises from the past century. Far from it. In most cases, there’s at least a decade when unemployment remains higher and home prices remain lower than they were before the crisis. The authors, husband and wife economists Vincent and Carmen Reinhart , take a close, quantitative look at the 21-year period surrounding financial crises (10 years before, the year the crisis hits, and 10 years after). Their analysis includes the Great Depression, the 1973 oil shock, and a bunch of smaller, regional crises in both developed and developing economies. They find that, in general, economies take a long, long time to recover, NPR reports.
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