For those who pay close attention to the business pages, recent weeks have made for nervous reading. One after another, regional US banks with billions of dollars on their books have collapsed. European banking stalwart CreditSuisse was bought in a fire sale. Rumours spread about who might be next. Are we … could it be … it’s not going to be another financial crash, is it? All of which makes Linda Yueh’s new book almost alarmingly timely, as if she were tanking the global economy as the mother of all guerrilla marketing stunts.
She opens with the bad news: economic crashes are a fact of life, and there will always be another one coming. Not only that, but however much they have in common – she surveys 10, from 1929 to 2020 – the next one will be the result of a novel combination of factors. There’s no formula that allows us to reliably forecast and avoid.
