Episodes in which credit to the private sector rises significantly above its long-run trend (that is 'credit booms') are often associated with periods of economic turbulence. Until recently however efforts at developing methodologies for identifying credit booms and characterizing the economic fluctuations that accompany them often produced mixed results (see for example Gourinchas Valdés and Landerretche 2001). In addition little was known about the association between economy-wide credit booms and the financial conditions of individual firms and banks and about whether the characteristics of credit booms differ across industrial and emerging economies. This changed with the growing literature on credit booms developed over the last five years. In particular in Mendoza and Terrones (2008) we proposed a new methodology for measuring and identifying credit booms and showed that it was successful at identifying credit booms with a clear cyclical pattern in both macro and micro data.