● The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned–and Have Still to Learn–from the Financial Crisis
By Martin Wolf
Review (FiveThirtyEight.com)
For Freud, everything was about sex. For Marx, it was the struggle between capital and labor. These thinkers took their big idea and applied it relentlessly. Or, as the saying goes (sort of): They had a favorite hammer, so every problem looked like a nail.
For Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times and one of the world’s foremost writers on macroeconomics and international finance, his hammer is “global imbalances.” And many of the economic and financial problems of today are the nails.
His latest book, “The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned — and Have Still to Learn — from the Financial Crisis,” was released Thursday in the United States. It’s a great read. The book will be unsettling to anyone who thinks the financial system is any more stable now. The financial sector in many high-income countries is still vulnerable to crises, and reforms put in place have not gone far enough, he argues.
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