The cruelest month of the cruelest year
By G.I. | WASHINGTON
Most readers of this blog are familiar with the path-breaking work of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff on financial crises. Fewer have heard of Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia, but they too have contributed richly to the raw material of crisis economics. Labouring away at the International Monetary Fund, they have assembled a detailed database of 147 banking crises from 1970 to 2011. They recently published a new working paper detailing some of their latest findings. There's lots of fascinating stuff in here but what leaped out at me was a chart showing the likeliest months for crises to begin.
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