The Economist's Books of the Year

economist.com

40 points·corey··7 comments

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a very good book on the crisis. The Economist calls it "One of the best books on the recent crisis". I very much agree with this assessment. It's written by the former investment banker Michael Lewis who is the author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball.

I just finished reading Bill Carter's The War for Late Night. The book recaps the Leno/Conan saga. I thought it was excellent. Lots of little lessons in there too, believe it or not. Not on the list, but highly recommended.

somehow a book is missing that would explain why the 'Economist' (sic!) had no idea of the upcoming financial crisis and completely failed to understand the catastrophic effects of economic politics that were promoted by the Economist, which lead to the crisis.

The majority of Economists at the time also failed to predict the financial crisis. As a science, macroeconomics only has a limited set of historical data to go on and no ethical opportunities for lab experiments. Given this, perhaps we put too much trust in the predictions of experts.

Huh? The Economist magazine has been going on about the housing and asset bubbles continually since about 2000-2004 (and is still saying that housing is way over-priced in the UK, which it is).

from 2008, the Economist:

'This is a black week. Those of us who have supported financial capitalism are open to the charge that the system we championed has merely enabled a few spivs to get rich. But it helped produce healthy economic growth and low inflation for a generation. It would take a very big recession indeed to wipe out those gains. Do not forget that in the debate ahead.'

Whilst they have been predicting the bubble for some time, it's important to remember that economists have successfully predicted 9 out of the last 5 downturns.

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