Crises, and financial crises specifically, have a bad habit of recurring despite all reforms and solemn “lesson learned” commitments. We know they happened, we know they will happen, but each time, we think that “this time is different”, as Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart famously showed. We are now almost 20 years from the first signs of the 2008 financial crash, and in the midst of a multipronged crisis, fueled by new financial instruments, diminishing financial oversight and control, increased inequality and financialization, global power shifts and wars at our doors.

To discuss how we remember, understand and anticipate financial crises, the MFO gathered MM. Youssef Cassis, Pierre Chabrol and Jean-Jacques Van Helten. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, which magnitude compared only to

that of 1929, Prof. Youssef Cassis embarked in a long-term research, most notably in the Mercator ERC project, “The Memory of Financial Crises: Financial Actors and Global Risk”. He aimed at understanding what memories, if any, the global 2008 financial crisis had embedded into individual and collective consciences, and to what extent these memories may help guide them away from or through the next financial crises. Jean-Jacques Van Helten, an historian by training, had become a banker a the time of the crisis, as Chief Risk Officer at the Bank of Montreal Office in London. It should then come as no surprise that he co-edited two volumes with Youssef Cassis, including one on the legacy of financial crises. As our younger participant, Pierre Chabrol’s knowledge of the 2008 crisis was mostly through learning. But as his job is to look forward and from above, to understand the dynamics at play in the financial sector, in one of the few global hubs of world finance, the extent to which he relies on past accumulated wisdom, if any, on financial crises, is of crucial relevance here.