Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: 1.Bankers Gambled with Our Money: They Won, We Lost -- 2.What has Globalisation Ever Done for Us? -- 3.Finance Goes Global and the Casino Rules our Lives -- 4.A Surreal Economic System: The Poor Lend to the Rich -- 5.Did I Break the Rock - and Does the Bank of England have a Long Lease on the Precious Property Called the Moral High Ground? -- 6.How the Bankers Hid the Risks that Bankrupted Us, With a Little Help from Basel's Mysterious and Secret Priesthood -- 7.If Europe Suffers Only a Lost Decade, It May Have Got Off Lightly -- 8.Is China the Solution or the Next Big Problem? -- 9.Will Europe Bankrupt the World? -- 10.Banks Still Hold Us To Ransom -- 11.We Have Hardly Begun to Fix this Mess -- 12.In the Humiliation of Barclays, Is There Hope?.

This book explains how the world got itself into the current economic mess - and how we might get out of it. This book is a map of what needs to be fixed.' The record-breaking unbroken growth between 1992 and 2008 wasn't the economic miracle that it seemed. It was based on a number of dangerous illusions - most notably that it didn't matter that the UK and US year after year consumed more than they earned. But we couldn't go on increasing our indebtedness forever. The financial crash of 2007/8 and the subsequent economic slump in much of the west was the moment when we realised we had borrowed more than we could afford to repay. So who got it wrong? Bankers, investors and regulators? And were they greedy, stupid or asleep? What was the role of government? And what part did we, as consumers, play in all this? How do we get through this difficult period of transition to a more sustainable economy, one based on investment and exports, rather than on borrowing and consumption?