What should we learn from the past 800 year? A recently publish book can tell us something, it suggests that the United States and other countries will emerge only slowly from what is often dubbed the“great recession.” The author of the book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Kenneth Rogoff, is a Harvard economist and author who has also published extensively on policy issues in international finance. He suggests in this book that the stock market will take two to three to get back to its peak before the crisis, and employment will need more than four years to creep back. Moreover, House prices will need seven to 10 years to return to their earlier level.

Over the past two centuries, financial crises have been followed within two or three years by a wave of sovereign debt crises, often bond defaults. Nations have piled up too much debt and have trouble paying back their bondholders.

This is the recent papers from Kenneth:

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/rogoff/Recent_Papers_Rogoff

Reference link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff