Why Are There So Many Banking Crises?
By Jean-Charles Rochet
Princeton University Press, $50

In the midst of the worst financial hurricane for decades, a book that asks why there are so many banking crises looks more than timely. That said, the current decade has been marked by fewer such upheavals than the period between the mid-1970s and the millennium, which had to cope with shocks stemming from the breakdown of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system and a global trend towards financial deregulation.