Just mentioned on Newsnight Review...The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means by Vince Cable will be published shortly. According to Amazon UK:
It's only being so cheerful that keeps him going.In this brilliantly incisive short book, Vince Cable, the most universally respected parliamentarian on the current world economic crisis, explains how we got here and where we're going.
There are some eerie similarities between the booming, increasingly integrated, global economy of the early twentieth century, at the end of that long era of peace, and the booming, increasingly integrated, global economy of recent years. Then, a golden age of rising prosperity was destroyed by war, inflation, depression, protectionism and another war. Yet the necessary lessons seemed to have been learned after World War II. Governments understood that they had a role in providing financial economic stability and a welfare safety net to complement, and to mitigate the harshness of, dynamic capitalist economies.
Yet within a short period of time this comfortable consensus has given way to something alarming: an economic storm has blown up with remarkable speed for which few appear prepared. A series of adverse developments have coincided and reinforced one another: the credit crunch; bursting bubbles in housing market; the commodity price shock, particularly for oil; and, a breakdown in multilateral economic cooperation, notably over trade.
To pursue the storm analogy, it has already become clear that some of the boats are not as sea worthy as their owners claimed. Captains and crew, as well as passengers, are panicking. And the worst of the storm is yet to come.
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