Time for a first round up of new and forthcoming titles. Unsurprisingly, the journalists and politicians have plenty of titles hot off the presses. Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable's The Storm is already published, and also was reviewed in the Economist and the Guardian. Two by journalists: Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed by BBC Newsnight's Paul Mason is out very soon, as is Gillian Tett of the FT's Fool's Gold. Martin Wolf's Fixing Global Finance is another recent book by an eminent FT writer. The BBC's excellent Hugh Pym and co-author Nick Kochan have What Happened? And Other Questions Everyone is Asking About the Credit Crunch.
From the academic world, Robert Shiller's The Subprime Solution is excellent. Also illuminating about the origins of the crisis is Inside the Fed Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke, by Stephen Axilrod.
More practically oriented, by the highly regarded John Calverley of Standard Chartered, is When Bubbles Burst: Surviving the Financial Fallout. One I haven't looked at but has a promising title is The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles and the Efficient Markets Fallacy by George Cooper. I've also read good things about Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles Morris but again haven't read it myself yet.
Loads more possibilities. An Amazon search on 'credit crunch' returns 93 titles including the Credit Crunch Cookbook. And no doubt loads more to come.
So where were they before the crash? Surely there has to be some account of why people in the know now weren't then. Is economic opinion never refuted in a way that is decisive?
To be fair to some of the above, they were saying the Emperor had no clothes well before the Crash – Cable, Shiller, Tett. As for the last question, some economics is not refutable in the classic 'scientific' way, but more closely resembles eg geology or evolutionary biology, kind of 'historical sciences'. Some parts of economics are refutable, it's just that the journals never, ever publish negative results which is a scandal really.
What will be interesting is to see which – if any – of these crash books delivers a return on the publisher's investment. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s there was another bubble inflating besides the one that saw stock markets reach ridiculous levels. It was in the publishing industry as editors bid up the price of books about the dot com economy and then about its crash. I have a hunch that few of those books earned out their advances (confession – I wrote one that got a tiny advance but still failed to earn it out) and I'm not convinced that this crop will do any better. Though Gillian Tett's deserves to do really well as she was about the only journalist to do the spadework needed to work out what was happening in the complex and rather dull world of international banking – and explain why it might all go horribly wrong.