From Greece scrambling to meet Eurozone austerity measures to America’s sluggish job growth, there is every indication that the world has not recovered from the economic implosion of 2008. And for many of us, the details of what led to the recession—and why it has continued—remain murky. Economic historian Larry Allen clears up the subject in The Global Economic Crisis, offering an insightful and nonpartisan chronology of events and their consequences. Illuminating the interlocked economic processes that lay beneath the crisis, he analyzes the changing nature of the global financial system, central bank policies, housing bubbles, deregulation, sovereign debt crises, and more. Allen begins the timeline with the economic crisis in Japan in the late 1990s, asking whether Japan’s experience could be an indicator of the outcome of the recession and what it can teach us about managing a sluggish economy. He then takes a comparative look at the economies of Brazil, China, and India. Throughout, he argues that many elements have contributed to the ongoing crisis, including the introduction of the euro, the growth of new financial instruments such as securitization, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, interest rate policies, and the housing boom and subprime mortgage fiasco. Lucid and informative, The Global Economic Crisis provides an impartial explanation to anyone seeking to understand the current state—and future—of the world’s economy.

In all major regions of the world, the economic recession is deep-seated, resulting in mass unemployment, the collapse of state social programs and the impoverishment of millions of people. The meltdown of financial markets was the result of institutionalized fraud and financial manipulation. The economic crisis is accompanied by a worldwide process of militarization, a "war without borders" led by the U.S. and its NATO allies. This book takes the reader through the corridors of the Federal Reserve, into the plush corporate boardrooms on Wall Street where far-reaching financial transactions are routinely undertaken. Each of the authors in this timely collection digs beneath the gilded surface to reveal a complex web of deceit and media distortion which serves to conceal the workings of the global economic system and its devastating impacts on people's lives.

The current global financial turmoil, triggered by the US subprime crisis, has spread quickly and resulted in the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s. As the world's third largest economy and the second largest trading nation, China is inevitably affected seriously. How China responds to the crisis and how effective its measures are in sustaining a healthy growth will have important implications, both domestically and internationally.The chapters in this volume are divided into five sections. Section one examines the overall impact of the global economic crisis and the responses of the Chinese government. Section two studies the regional aspect of the economy affected by the crisis. Section three explores such economies of the Mainland's southern neighbors as Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and the prospect of China's trade. Section four surveys the impact on the ideological and social aspects of the country. Section five concludes with an assessment of China's external policies. The volume offers a comprehensive and in-depth assessment of the impact of the crisis and the measures of the Chinese government to overcome the difficulties.

'Crisis in the Global Economy' reflects on the state of global capitalism, developed in the mobile 'multiversity' of the UniNomade network of international researchers and activists during the months immediately following the first signals of the current financial and economic crisis.

The global economic downturn that followed the collapse of major US financial institutions is no doubt the most significant crisis of our times. Its effects on corporate and governmental balance sheets have been devastating, as have been its impacts on the employment and well being of tens of millions of citizens. It continues to pose major challenges to national policymakers and institutions around the world. Managing public uncertainty and anxiety is vital in coping with financial crises. This requires not just prompt action but, most of all, persuasive communication by government leaders. At the same time, the very occurrence of such crises raises acute questions about the effectiveness and robustness of current government policies and institutions. With the stakes being so high, defining and interpreting what is going on, how and why it happened, and what ought to be done now become key questions in the political and policy struggles that crises invariably unleash. In this volume, we study how heads of government, finance ministers and national bank governors in eight countries as well as the EU engage in such 'framing contests', and how their attempts to interpret the cascading events of the economic downturn were publicly received. Using systematic content analysis of speeches and media coverage, this volume offers a unique comparative assessment of public leadership in times of crisis.

In 2008, the global economy experienced the most severe crash since World War II. A sharp collapse in international trade followed, leaving no country on the globe immune to a sequence of economic shocks. This timely book explores many of the key issues raised in the wake of the global economic crisis and provides an in-depth analysis of crisis transmission to emerging markets. The expert contributors compare the recent crisis with earlier crises, explore international aspects of the crisis from the perspectives of markets and trade, and examine macroeconomic policy responses. In so doing, they address important questions including: How did this crisis differ from those suffered previously? How and why did flaws in financial markets contribute to the crisis? How important were global imbalances and global overheating in explaining the global meltdown? Did different pre-crisis fundamentals generate different post-crisis performances? And, how severe were the economic shocks to countries such as Korea and other emerging economies? Academics, students and policymakers in the fields of economics, international economics, finance money and banking and Asian studies will find this book to be a thought-provoking and stimulating read.

By reaching beyond "how" the crisis happened to "why" the crisis happened, the authors provide fresh thinking about how to respond

Why did the economists of the so-called "mainstream" seem to fail to foresee the global economic crisis that exploded in 2008? And why do they appear to have difficulty in putting forward an interpretation of it that is consistent with the theoretical foundations of their models? These two questions have echoed insistently since the outbreak of the crisis, not only in academic circles but also in the mass media, and appear to reflect increasingly widespread dissatisfaction with the dominant paradigm of economic theory. Many believe that the global recession now underway may constitute an historic watershed for the evolution of economics and therefore that an authentic change of paradigm is called for, rather than only minor adjustments to the dominant approach. Since the start of the crisis, there has indeed been a profusion of contributions from alternative areas of economic study, and in particular from those adopting a critical stance with respect to mainstream economic theory. This collection puts forward promising reinterpretations of the primary schools of heterodox political economy, stringent critiques of the conventional readings of the recession, new schemes of theoretical and empirical analysis of the crisis, and proposals for economic policies alternative to those hitherto adopted. This book contains a selection of some of the most recent contributions to the critique of mainstream economic theory and policy, and discusses the origins and possible evolutions of the current economic crisis. The collection should be of interest to students and researchers focussing on macroeconomics, monetary economics, political economy and financial economics.

The world economy is currently in the throes of a global economic crisis reminiscent of the great depressions of the 1930s and the 1870s. As back then, the crisis has exposed the major structural imbalances in financial and credit markets in addition to global trade forcing many governments, developed and developing, to impose debilitating austerity measures that are exacerbating the structural weaknesses that caused the crisis in the first place. This volume offers historical insights into the origins of the contemporary crisis as well as detailed analyses of the financial and trade dimensions, an assessment of the technological and innovation context along with perspectives on the implications for unemployment and gender imbalances.