Welcome to this mini-site about my new book MELTDOWN: The End of the Age of Greed. It's published by Verso on 27 April 2009. To pre-order the book on Amazon go here for UK and here for the USA.
The book tells the story of the events of September-October 2008: I'm the Economics Editor of BBC Newsnight, so I had a ringside seat. It explains how we got here - from the shadow banking system, to subprime, to the commodities speculation that forced a billion people to go without meals in mid-2008.
It also explains why, love it or loathe it, the neo-liberal era is over. There are no graphs and charts - only explanations and a blow by blow account of what I saw.
I started writing MELTDOWN on a train travelling back from New York to Washington, in the middle of the week Lehman collapsed. The first part of the book tells the story of what happened between the bankruptcy of Lehman and the comprehensive bailout package of October. Part two is an exploration of the subprime lending and securitised finance phenomenon - explained in layman's terms. The last part is a brief history of free market economics and a discussion about where this crisis fits into the long cycle of capitalist development (here's a clue, with difficulty).
The book has been reviewed in the Sunday Telegraph, Times, Scotsman and New Statesman (see right). I am doing various lectures, discussions and debates about it. In the meantime follow my BBC blog (far right) and BBC Newsnight coverage of the crisis as it continues to unfold.
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