> They also have a nice quip in the conclusion, that the run-up to the
> post-subprime banking crisis looks a lot like the petro-dollar
> recycling boom of the late 70s that led to the third-world debt banking
> crisis of the early 80s. The only difference is that this time we recycled the
> money to a developing country in the US, namely the subprime
> borrowers. But the effect on the banks was the same.
I first encountered reference to R&R's paper in Martin Wolf's (FT) 1/9 column. Wolf was also impressed with the parallel between the credit boom in the late 1970s and the subprime boom in the early and mid 2000s made by R&R. I thought then that this analogy had been raised on PEN-L way before R&R called attention to it:
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2007w32/msg00188.htm