The list reminds one of Cole Porter. Moroccans do it and Greeks do it, Thais do it and Koreans do it. Some Argentines without means do it. Even Finns, Brits, Yanks and Swedes do it.

No, I'm not talking about falling in love.

As "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," a valuable new book by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, makes clear, what these and dozens of other nations do is produce financial crises that devastate their own economies. Moreover, they explain, we are somewhere in the middle of a big such crisis right now, and it is far from clear how it will play out before it is all over.

Both authors are well-respected economists. Cuban-born Reinhart, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland who held positions at Bear Stearns and the International Monetary Fund before moving to academia, has studied international financial crises, especially in Latin America. Rogoff, a former IMF chief economist now in an endowed chair at Harvard, is one of the brightest contemporary scholars of international finance. (Let's call them RR, to save space.)

Their book is ambitious. It covers much of the same ground as Charles Kindleberger's witty classic "Manias, Crashes and Panics," but RR go both deeper and broader. Kindleberger describes successive financial crises anecdotally, citing miscellaneous data to illustrate the extent of these episodes.

Their title says much: Financial crises, like the one we are in, result from human folly. But history repeats itself.

Despite a well-known history of bubbles and collapses going back centuries, the irrational conviction that "this time is different" leads business and government officials into collectively self-destructive decisions.

Remember how recently Wall Street gurus and the wizards throughout the Federal Reserve collectively dismissed the fact that U.S. housing prices had risen more from 1996 to 2006 than in the preceding 200 years? Why, there was no bubble, and even if there was, the Fed should do nothing!

Short-term interest rates were half the inflation rate and only a fifth of long-term average levels. The money supply had grown twice as fast as the real economy for a decade. No problem, Consumer Price Index increases were mild.

Nor was there much outcry on Wall Street, in government or by voters as we quadrupled the inflation-adjusted national debt from 1981 through 2008. After all, household indebtedness was increasing even faster over much of the period.

There may be eight centuries of economic folly, but Americans have a long history wanting to do things bigger and better than anyone else. That apparently includes financial crises.

Now, we are paying the price, and our children and grandchildren will keep on paying for decades. They will rightly call us fools.

Economist Edward Lotterman teaches and writes in St. Paul, Minn. Write him at ed@edlotterman.com.