Monday, May 19, 2014

The Mess We're In

Cover image for The mess we're in : why politicians can't fix financial crises.

There are many books on the economic crisis that began in 2007 .  While most describe it as a "global economic crisis", they almost all concentrate on the US, and the specific form it took here.  The Mess We're In, by contrast, centers on a British perspective, with the US used mostly as a counter-example.  This is undeniably useful - the UK, for example, never had an equivalent to the Glass-Steagal Act, the 1999 repeal of which is often cited as a major contributor to the 2007 crisis.

Unfortunately, this advantage only goes so far.  Fraser-Sampson's creed turns out to be fairly garden-variety libertarianism, which, it seems safe to say, is more exotic in the UK than in the US.  The conservative critique of the policies which led to the financial crisis has been advanced better elsewhere (The Great Deformation, for example), and Fraser-Sampson at no point engages with a serious version of the liberal account (as developed in Age of Greed, amongst other places).

Not a bad book, but a disappointment.

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