Sowihe: Canada is a very boring place, thank god, from a banking standpoint. They had virtually no failures, no failures from any bank of any significance. Small banks failed in canada occasionally, but it was ment right and dismanagement. Their total amount of credit relative to g d p was either comparable to or better than the us. It's really quite a remarkable difference. And i should mention also, its all up, probably well.
Charles Calomiris of Columbia University and Stephen Haber of Stanford University, co-authors of Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit, talk with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about their book. The conversation focuses on how politics and economics interact to give some countries such as Canada a remarkably stable financial system while others such as the United States have a much less stable system. The two authors discuss the political forces that explain the persistence of seemingly bad financial regulation. The conversation includes a discussion of the financial crisis of 2008.