The Great Depression and the Great Recession are the two great economic crises of the past hundred years. While there are accounts of both episodes, no one has yet attempted a sustained comparative analysis. In Hall of Mirrors, Barry Eichengreen draws on his unparalleled expertise for a brilliantly conceived dual-track account of the two crises and their consequences. Rather than telling the stories of the two crises in sequence, instead he weaves them together. He describes the two bubble-fuelled build-ups, then the onset of crisis, the subsequent financial and economic and collapse, the policy response, and finally the recovery.A theme of Eichengreen's narrative is that while the policy response to the Great Recession was importantly shaped by perceptions of the Great Depression -- contemporary policymakers did in fact learn lessons from the Depression that enabled them, this time, to prevent the worst -- they could have done better. Their failure to do so reflected a tendency to tak