When the Money Runs Out
The End of Western Affluence
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An eminent economist warns that Western nations’ economic expectations for the future are way out of sync with the realities of economic stagnation and stringent steps will be required to avoid massive political and economic upheaval.
“It is alarmingly difficult to disagree with Stephen King. All one can say, perhaps, is that one of the great errors of human nature—strongly displayed before the credit crunch—is the belief that a prevailing trend will continue indefinitely. The crunch is surely a reminder that what goes up must come down.”—Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph
“[King] is dabbling in the financial equivalent of the horror genre. Perhaps even scarier, his is the stuff of nonfiction.”—Michael J. Casey, Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
HSBC economist King (Losing Control) argues that the West is doomed to suffer extended recessions, rising unemployment, and declining standards of living, with no end in sight. A fan of clunky metaphors "the economic goose kept laying golden eggs," he says, has become "menopausal" King suggests that excessive lending has led to the rise of risky investments, causing debtor countries to default and creditor countries' assets to vanish. According to King, in the end the entire international financial infrastructure is an illusion "involving a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment." King's forays through economic history mix long, highly technical passages with entertaining vignettes from U.S. lunar missions, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Mary Poppins, but the conclusion is the same: we're broke. King dismisses the economic lessons of past depressions as obsolete, based as they were on radically different fundamentals, but warns that the accompanying social ills are inevitably reappearing. His brief section on policy recommendations provides a set of disappointingly vague proposals for restoring trust and accountability in the Eurozone, which, relatively anodyne though they may be, are "near enough impossible" to implement in the current political climate.
