Finance and banking are no exemptions to this experience, much to the contrary, but I would like to stress that ignoring the lessons of history is not the rule in the financial community. Let me mention two or three examples from the area of central banking policymaking.
In numerous cases, historical evidence has shown that a hasty liberalization of financial markets nearly always leads to financial crises, whose macro-economic costs are sometimes extremely high. Learning from the generalized mistakes of other countries, financial market liberalization in Austria followed a step-by-step approach and relied on the experience of others to set the “right” sequence of measures.