According to Angus Maddison’s data, the real per capita GDP of the United Kingdom rose between 1500 and 1820 at an average rate of only 0.27 per cent per annum. 2 At that pace, living standards doubled about every 250 years. In other words, a person would not live all that much better than their grandparents – assuming they could discern any difference.
The recognition that the world is less formable than commonly thought, and that supervision can provide no guarantee that a bank will never fail, cannot allay this disappointment; nor can the notion that we were not dealing with a typically Dutch phenomenon, but that there were banks all over the world that collapsed in the wake of the credit crisis.