Each and every one of the recent booms and busts – in Latin America, Asia, and Russia in the 1990’s, and in Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and Ireland more recently – shared some combination of unsustainably low financial costs, asset bubbles, over-indebtedness, wage growth unwarranted by productivity gains, and domestic absorption in excess of production. In every case, these imbalances were fueled by easily identifiable periods of euphoria and sudden asset-prices increases.