Last-minute Christmas gift idea

If you need a last-minute Christmas gift for an economist — or indeed anyone who is interested in the financial crisis — you might want to pick up This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly from your local bookstore.

The book, written by economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, goes back hundreds of years and looks around the globe to show that financial crises really aren't anomalies — when you look at the grand scale of history, there are clear patterns that emerge.