In the early years of this decade, then chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown claimed to have vanquished the perennial boom to bust cycle of the British economy.
The combination of a newly independent central bank focused on keeping inflation low coupled with a government dedicated to fiscal prudence signalled a clean break with the inflationary policies of the past, he argued. Meanwhile advanced techniques of risk management would permit financial deregulation to unlock new forms of wealth creation fuelling rapid yet stable growth. In effect, Brown was saying, this time it was different.
Even at the time, it seemed to many that such enormous hubris must inevitably be followed by economic nemesis. Yet Brown was hardly the first person to fall for the seductive belief that this time things would be different. It seems that every financial crisis of recent years has been preceded by a succession of weighty thinkers offering plausible-sounding explanations of how some fundamental change in conditions meant that the old rules no longer applied and that both economy and markets had broken free of their former constraints and were headed for a new golden age.
Before the Asian financial crisis of 1997 we had a line-up of regional leaders claiming that 'Asian values' would allow emerging countries in the region to escape the laws of economic gravity dragging down their less fortunate counterparts elsewhere.
Before the dotcom bust of 2000, any number of equity analysts queued up to explain how corporate profits, and even revenues, were no longer important and that stratospheric stock valuations were fully justified in the brave new age of the internet.
More recently a whole series of economists, financiers and - yes, Mr Brown - politicians were on hand to tell us how the global economy had broken free of the old laws and was embarked on a virtuous new path of high growth, ever-rising asset prices and unprecedented wealth creation.
This tendency was most apparent in the United States, where there was a widespread belief that the lessons of past economic crises had been learned once and for all.