Such is the magnitude of the event that the definitive account of the financial collapse of September 2008 and its consequences has surely yet to be written.
I do not mean by stating that to deride numerous worthwhile attempts at a first draft of history. Journalistic efforts such as Paul Mason’s Meltdown, Elliott and Atkinson’s The Gods That Failed and Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold all do a reasonable job in explaining approximately what went wrong.
There are even works by economists, such as Crisis Economics by Roubini and Mihm and Keynes: the Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky that are accessible for those without a background in the dismal science. Continue reading
Most people within Labour who advocate working with the Lib Dems focus on 2015. Neal Lawson, for example, in the 
Just because he exchanges a few tweets with Labour’s leader, does that make him a friend of Labour? There was a time, when he did sound like a voice of reason to the Left of New Labour. He raised concerns about the level of private debt long before the credit crunch and he was the first to call for the nationalisation of Northern Rock, but having 
So Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, cheers us up today by telling us that if a quarter of the annual tax receipts foregone through either avoidance, evasion or uncollected debt were actually levied, it could cut income tax by 2p in the £ (roughly £10bn). It would have been better if he’d said it would then not be necessary for Cameron in his speech today to propose robbing and harassing those who genuinely need benefits for which they have contributed via national insurance contributions and which he has no contractual authority to renege on. 
Vince Cable rightly castigates top pay excesses – and to give him credit, no-one else in this government of millionaires is doing so – but the solutions he put forward yesterday to the LibDem conference are worth little more than a bucket of warm spit. Simplifying complex executive remuneration schemes is not going to stop FTSE-100 chief executives sleeping soundly who now take home on average £4.2 million a year (or to bring it home what means, it’s £80,770 a week). Nor are they going to sweat about ‘strengthening the link between bonuses and performance’ when bonuses have been turned into semi-guaranteed payments where managers seldom get less than 80% of the maximum. Nor does performance-related pay mean a fig when chief executive pay over the last dozen years has quadrupled, yet the stock exchange index is no higher than it was at the start of this period. 