The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King – review
Mervyn King looks like one of those old-fashioned bank managers who cast a paternalistic eye on the nervous customer. Or he could be a GP telling you that you really need to exercise more and go easy on the carbs. It is in this vein that he probes the state of the global economy; his diagnosis does not reassure.
Not for him is the Piketty-esque grand sweep. He avoids the hubris of the "I told you so" school (virtually none of them actually did tell us so ahead of time). He says he is not interested in the blame game, which is probably just as well considering that he was governor of the Bank of England at the time of the great crash of 2007-08. He baldly states: "No doubt there were bankers who were indeed wicked and central bankers who were incompetent, though the vast majority of both whom I met during the crisis were neither." Many (myself included) might beg to disagree, but this argument has exhausted itself.
Most alarming is the inability of economists and politicians to think their way out of the mire
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