There is a familiarity to the current banking crisis if you think back to the Great Recession or the S&L meltdown of the 1980s. There is some move of deregulation and then, within a few years, more or less, some group of banks gets hit hard and the US government goes into overdrive to control contagion.

But if you think you have a sense of déjà vu, imagine how Andrew Metrick of the Yale School of Management and Paul Schmelzing of Boston College's Carroll School of Management felt when looking at almost 750 years of banking crises.

"This paper contextualizes events using a new long-run database on banking-sector policy interventions over the last eight centuries," they wrote in the abstract. "On that basis, recent actions have already been unusual in their policy mix and size—in the database, the vast majority of events with the same pattern of interventions ultimately evolved into 'systemic' bank-distress episodes."