Today’s global economic crisis has been preceded by a history of constant, systemic instability. This timeline, created by Global Policy Forum’s Anahi Wiedenbrüg and Alexander Post, shows a forty year record of disequilibria, meltdowns, panics and other forms of crises, beginning in 1970. The picture it provides is of crises as a norm – far from the “equilibrium model” ordinarily taught in economics classes. There appear here, in this on-line presentation, the collapse of major firms, extreme currency speculation, real estate and financial bubbles, Ponzi schemes, and stock market meltdowns, sometimes harming hundreds of millions of people. The reader can see that as markets have become more global and as regulations have been abolished, the system has become more prone to devastating crisis on a worldwide scale.
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