Adding together the depth of the downturn and time until recovery, Ms Reinhart and Mr Rogoff calculate a “severity index”. Across the 100 cases the average decline in output per person from the pre-crisis level is 11.3% and recovery takes an average of 8.4 years, resulting in a severity score of 19.7 (see chart). America’s Depression of the 1930s had a severity score of 38.6—the 13th-worst of the 100 in the sample. Crisis gold goes to Chile in 1926 with a score of 62.6, silver to Spain in 1931 with 60.6 and bronze to Peru in 1983 with 57. As for Greece, if one assumes, somewhat optimistically, that 2013 marked the absolute bottom for real output per person and that output will recover to the pre-crisis level by 2019, then its severity score will come in at 36.