Globalisation Fractures

Charles Dumas is Chairman of Lombard Street Research, where he has been Head of the World Service since 1998. He is one of the world's leading macroeconomic forecasters. He was previously a journalist at The Economist, an economist at General Motors and J. P. Morgan, and then managing director in JPM's M&A department in New York.

To understand the causes of the financial crisis, read this insightful analysis of how globalisation led to our present predicament. This book will teach you more about why the crisis happened than any blow-by-blow account by an alleged protagonist -- Mervyn King - Governor of the Bank of England Charles Dumas has consistently been one of the ablest communicators on the financial crisis - a man with a nose for danger. In characteristically acerbic style, he sets out the causes of our distress, seeks out those to blame and maps out the escape routes. Required reading -- David Marsh, author of The Euro - The Politics of the New Global Currency Unless we correctly analyse the cause of the current crisis, we will never be able to cure it or prevent a recurrence. Most analysis does not get beneath the symptoms, but Charles Dumas gets to the root problem. -- Peter Lilley Thank God for Charles Dumas. He displays a true economist's understanding that most things in economics are the opposite of what you would suppose - that for example the global crisis has been as much the work of savings gluttons as of wanton debtors. -- Peter Jay The question of who is to blame for the global financial crisis has been entertaining analysts - and presidents - for three years. As Charles Dumas points out in an amusingly dry introduction to his latest book, a case can be made for almost everyone. The service he performs is to focus on the responsibility of those countries that have made their way through the turmoil with a high level of savings and strong surpluses. China and Germany, then, are his prime villains, and, to some extent, Japan. They have sold their goods to an increasingly indebted world and ... lent that world the money to do so. ... the countries that have enjoyed an export-led boom cannot, as a point of logic, expect others to follow their model or they will have no one to whom to sell. He is right, too, to point to the way that China, in pegging its currency to the dollar, and Germany, within the euro, used partially fixed exchange rates to keep their already low labour costs competitive ... He has performed the service of turning the spotlight on to those hiding under a disguise of self-proclaimed virtue. -- Bronwen Maddox The Times