There have been many business cycles in the US over the past 50 years (although less so since the great moderation). Many of us youngsters are too young to remember many of these.
Is there some summary article / plot containing these, including their causes? For example:
by Charles Kindleberger
An easier reading compared to Reinhart and Rogoff. It informally explains how crises occur and presents some famous examples.
by Reinhart and Rogoff
Detailed, structured, and comprehensive. A brief paper by the same authors on the same topic: This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises. The paper's abstract:
This paper offers a "panoramic" analysis of the history of financial crises dating from England's fourteenth-century default to the current United States sub-prime financial crisis. Our study is based on a new dataset that spans all regions. It incorporates a number of important credit episodes seldom covered in the literature, including for example, defaults and restructurings in India and China. [...] We find that serial default is a nearly universal phenomenon as countries struggle to transform themselves from emerging markets to advanced economies. Major default episodes are typically spaced some years (or decades) apart, creating an illusion that "this time is different" among policymakers and investors. [...] We also confirm that crises frequently emanate from the financial centers with transmission through interest rate shocks and commodity price collapses. [...] Our data also documents other crises that often accompany default: including inflation, exchange rate crashes, banking crises, and currency debasements.