The Shifts and the Shocks, Martin Wolf
The Shifts and the Shocks, Martin Wolf
List: $34.98 | Sale: $24.48
Club: $17.48

The Shifts and the Shocks
What We've Learned and Have Still to Learn From the Financial Crisis

Author: Martin Wolf

Narrator: Sean Pratt

Unabridged: 14 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 10/01/2014

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

From the chief economic commentator for the Financial Times, a brilliant tour d’horizon of the new global economy and its trajectory

There have been many books that have sought to explain the causes and courses of the financial and economic crisis which began in 2007–8. The Shifts and the Shocks is not another detailed history of the crisis, but the most persuasive and complete account yet published of what the crisis should teach us about modern economies and economics.

The book identifies the origin of the crisis in the complex interaction between globalization, hugely destabilizing global imbalances and our dangerously fragile financial system. In the eurozone, these sources of instability were multiplied by the tragically defective architecture of the monetary union. It also shows how much of the orthodoxy that shaped monetary and financial policy before the crisis occurred was complacent and wrong. In doing so, it mercilessly reveals the failures of the financial, political and intellectual elites who ran the system.

The book also examines what has been done to reform the financial and monetary systems since the worst of the crisis passed. “Are we now on a sustainable course?” Wolf asks. “The answer is no.” He explains with great clarity why “further crises seem certain” and why the management of the eurozone in particular “guarantees a huge political crisis at some point in the future.” Wolf provides far more ambitious and comprehensive plans for reform than any currently being implemented.

Written with all the intellectual command and trenchant judgment that have made Martin Wolf one of the world’s most influential economic commentators, The Shifts and the Shocks matches impressive analysis with no-holds-barred criticism and persuasive prescription for a more stable future. It is a book no one with an interest in global affairs will want to neglect.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Maru

These days most economists are fantasists. Like nerdy teenagers they hide safe behind the doors of their academic bedrooms dreaming of bizarre ways to model the workings of the world, then giving their fantasies sensible sounding but ultimately meaningless names: “rational expectations",“expansionar......more

Goodreads review by Julian

A Keynesian economist prescribing a Keynesian solution to a Keynesian crisis. Mr. Wolf gives the best description of the crisis and tries to explain the nuances of it in a very grad-school economics professor way. He tries to explain some of the terms and concepts, but it comes off as explaining a c......more

Goodreads review by Laurent

Sometimes I think being completely ignorant of economics would ease by peace of mind. Seriously. During the financial crisis of 2007-8, I never had the impression that people around me had any idea that we were dancing on the ridge of the volcano, and that just one additional mistake on the top of a......more

Goodreads review by Joseph

I received this as a First Reads giveaway and can recommend it as a sweeping global overview of the financial crisis and its aftermath. I have always respected Wolf's writing because he is a pragmatic economist willing to solve problems practically than ideologically. In fact, he establishes his cre......more