Book Review: Anatole Kaletsky on financial crises and capitalism’s fourth age
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
By Michael Prowse, Senior Visiting Fellow
According to Anatole Kaletsky most pundits have got the global financial crisis of 2007-09 dead wrong. They have confused cyclical and structural forces.
In Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis (PublicAffairs, 2010), he argues that the recent recession was just a typical financial bust exacerbated by gross policy errors. The main factors propelling global growth before the downturn – one billion extra Asian consumers and producers, globalisation, financial innovation and sensible macroeconomic policies – will soon reassert themselves, and the global economy will enjoy a fairly robust recovery. It is nonsense, he claims, to believe that we have entered a new era of permanently subdued growth, as suggested by commentators such as Mohamed El-Erian of Pimco.