The global economy is experiencing the biggest crisis of the last eighty years. The crisis started in late 2007 as a financial crisis of Wall Street and then turned to a Great Recession of the global real economy with negative GDP growth and high levels of unemployment. In times of serious economic crises policy makers are de facto turning to the domains of Theory and History to derive useful lessons on how to deal with the crisis. This composite course seeks to draw such lessons from the fields of history and theory of financial crises.

Upon the systematic attendance and completion of the course, students will be able to understand, analyze, interpret and assess: 1) The major economic crises in the history of the last four centuries. 2) The economic crisis theories of Marx, Schumpeter, Hayek, Keynes, Polanyi, Friedman and Minsky. 3) The nature and causes of the current global economic crisis. 4) The economic policies used globally to address this crisis, along with the effects of these policies.