800 years of financial folly
Unsurprisingly finding itself on the bestseller list is a book by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart called This Time is Different, an economic history of the dozens of financial crises that have occurred over the past 800 years. The NY Times has a profile of the authors.
Mr. Rogoff says a senior official in the Japanese finance ministry was offended at the suggestion in "This Time Is Different" that Japan had once defaulted on its debt and sent him an angry letter demanding a retraction. Mr. Rogoff sent him a 1942 front-page article in The Times documenting the forgotten default. "Thank you," the official wrote in apology, "for teaching the Japanese something about our own country."