The full title of this book by Richard Duncan is
“The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy“.
In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave the book Four Stars. This means it is Good and Well Worth Reading.
Here is my book review.
The world is addicted to credit expansion
Is it still worth reading this book written in 2011 about the events after 2008?
Yes I think it is although I have a couple of caveats:
1) Inevitably the book is America-centric with little consideration for the rest of the world accept for how it may impact on or exaggerate changes in America.
.
2) It’s odd reading predictions for the future from 2012 onwards when you know that the worst was postponed.
The book presents an excellent argument for the idea that America (and the world) has enjoyed decades of growth on the back of an exception increase in overall debt levels (consumers, businesses, financial institutions and governments). More frightening is perhaps that these incremental increases in debt have a lesser and lesser impact on growth.
It also rightly points out that globalisation has given us in the west short term gains but it has hollowed out our economies as manufacturing can’t compete when labour costs are 90% or more cheaper elsewhere.
We have to run harder and harder just to virtually stand still.
It also makes it clear that policy options are limited unless we want a crushing depression. If we carry on as we are increasing debt levels, we build a bigger crisis in the future, if austerity is seriously undertaken then things crash quickly (all this talk about austerity in the UK is more talk than action)…
What’s needed is better government spending, not less. By that the author means investment in resources that will deliver improvements in the future and he suggests solar power as an obvious choice.
I agree but I believe the future prospects are worse than the author suggests. I believe we are heading to a situation where excess debt is just one level of problem but we need to add to that poor demographics, natural resource limitations and increasingly expensive commodities and the adverse effects of climate change.
Things will be much harder but the book argues that many of the extreme ideas will make things much worse.
Baby boomers and Generation X have lived through a bountiful period of easy growth and have largely wasted the opportunity on increasingly short term consumerism. There has to be a mind-shift and I don’t see any real movement to where we need to be.
My overriding thought is that I wish we could go back and change the past to reverse some of these decisions that appeared to make sense at the time. Sadly we can’t.
It is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
[bestbooks]
Get To Know Me
[sos]
[6Steps]
