No one in the United States wanted to think about bank failures either, not in 1997 and not in 2007. Indeed, as his reaction to Rajan’s impolitic remarks at the Jackson Hole conference in August 2005 made only too clear, Summers was one of the “very serious people” enforcing that taboo. The state of denial was common. The difference was that when the unthinkable happened, the United States had a structure of federal government within which to improvise a response. The misfortune of the EU was that when the crisis struck, it not only lacked such structures. The crisis came at a moment when the
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Yep
