Mining bosses were rightly wary of talk of a "supercycle" in an industry with a history of booms and busts, yet none would concede that China, its economy booming, was in any danger of losing its appetite for their products.
Additionally in 2008-9 threehree Baltic states suffered their own financial meltdowns driven by the credit booms and reckless lending of the Scandinavian banks that dominate the region.
It was certainly noteworthy that in his recent interview in this newspaper, Clarke complained of the "ludicrous cycle of ridiculous housing booms followed by housing crashes".
On the surface, Luca Guadagnino's bold, aggressively contemporary direction attacks an age-old story from all angles, zooming, tracking and tilting as John Adams's affecting symphonic score booms.
Certainly there have been at least two major booms in the Northern Ireland economy since first the ceasefires and latterly the establishment of a devolved government, although they were both based partially on the shaky foundations of a rising housing market.
In a 2010 paper Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko of the University of California, Berkeley argued that the fiscal multiplier may be negative during booms, meaning that spending cuts actually raise growth.
Is another round of madness following directly on the heels of the last, or is something else going on?In a new NBER working paper, Edward Glaeser examines America's long history of property booms and busts and reckons that the assumption of irrationality actually fits the data rather poorly.
Long booms tended to result in excessive risk-taking and "Ponzi finance", where investors buy assets with borrowed money in the hope of quick capital gains.
HISTORICALLY, Colorado's economic booms came in metallic colours gold, silver and uranium silvery-grey.
That, in turn, could help prevent government from resorting to "pro-cyclical" fiscal policy, whereby they exacerbate both busts, by slashing spending, and booms, by bingeing.Linking bond payments to GDP should also make a country's debt-to-GDP ratio less prone to sudden jumps, and thus lower the odds of a debt crisis.
Those flows enabled debtor countries such as America, Spain and Greece to finance housing booms and government deficits without paying punitive interest rates.
