An account of the recent history of economic crisis and how these impact politics in fundamental ways.

This book offers a lucid picture of how differing world views translate to economic policy and how this in hand impacts everyday life in direct and indirect effects.

In essence one source of the worlds political dis-order emerges from the reverberation of global financial mismanagement, or lack of forward direction. ( )

Massive history of the ten years around the 2008 crash. The actual crash part is just fascinating to relieve and view through this much wider aperture of a world reaching crisis. The complexity, the terror, the after effects. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

A magisterial exploration of the global economy leading up to and through the Great Recession of 2008 and its fallout for the next decade.

The author considers the events of 2007 and 2008 and the political and economic decisions made for thirty years which led to the economic crisis. He lays out, in about the most comprehensible terminology possible, what exactly happened, and the nature of the crisis: yes, precipitated by all the bad mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps with inflated ratings, but really the political mistake of letting Lehman Brothers go bankrupt and the freezing of the credit market that followed.

Yet the author's real emphasis is on the European side of the crisis: he sets forth how the US Fed became the fund for the whole world in ways which were not made much of publicly at the time. He reveals how exposed European banks were to the financial products America was selling, and examined the various EU crises of 2010-2013 as political farce which led to profound social and economic devastation for Southern Europe in order to placate German obstruction, and all ultimately for naught, since the actions the Americans took to stabilize their market would eventually be what the EU would have to do for its own.

The author also establishes how the turn toward nationalism, far right candidates, and especially Trump and Brexit are direct consequences of the economic crisis, even if only realized 8 years later. He also discusses the response in Asia and other places and how the financial crisis provided China and Russia with opportunities to challenge America as the solitary superpower.

No doubt this work will become one of the standard resources on the 2008 financial crisis and its effects. Worth the read. ( )

Two points before I begin this review. The first is that economics is not a subject or topic that I find easy to follow and understand. I struggle with reading books by economists or books about economics. Second, I skimmed through this book off and on for over four weeks. Parts of the book I understood, some I did not. This is an excellent book for economic majors in college. The author is very smart and understands, politics, culture and history as well as economic theory.

I may try to re-read this book later.I had also watched the author in a Youtube presentation of his book where he provided a general outline of the book’s content.

While I don’t say that you need to have an economics degree to read or understand this book, it sure would come in helpful. I gave the book three stars on my understanding. I’m sure it rates five stars to those with a much better comprehension of all the economic turmoil across the world in the last decade. This is a global review not just a view of U.S. economic history since 2008.

P.S. The author does not seem to think well of the current U.S. President. ( )

Invaluable in giving a comprehensive view of the aftermath of the financial crisis, showing the connections and reasons for otherwise disconnected events. Unlike most books on the subject I've read it doesn't concentrate on only one event and doesn't waste time bemoaning man's inhumanity to man. This way it's able to fit a lot of information in a tome that given the subject and span is very slim. ( )