The Gods That Failed: How the Financial Elite Have Gambled Away Our Futures

THE FIRST BOOK TO TELL THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE CREDIT CRUNCH You have been had. MARKETS ARE NOT MAGIC. DEBT IS NOT FREEDOM. THE GODS HAVE FAILED. A risk-prone, privatised profit-driven economic model overseen by a largely unaccountable, greedy and arrogant elite has resulted in one of the worst financial crises in history. The over-paid heroes of Wall Street and the City worshipped the gods of globalisation, financialisation and speculation, and during the years of economic growth we, and our governments, worshipped them too. But high in the boardrooms of Mount Olympus, the reckless lust of banks for big bonuses and bigger profits led to excesses that have proved unsupportable. The warning signs were ignored - now the Masters of the Universe are toppling and we're footing the bill. Find out how an unregulated elite were able to run riot with your cash, and find out how to stop it happening again.

About the Author :
Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson are Economics Editors of the Guardian and the Mail on Sunday respectively. They are the co-authors of Fantasy Island and The Age of Insecurity.

Review :
Agree, or disagree, you should read this book... As the crunch intensifies these critics are out in force - and the most influential of their books will undoubtedly turn out to be this readable yet controversial tome Well written and witty Has withstood the test of time, despite being published before the events of this autumn - largely because the authors took such a pessimistic, not to mention dim, view of global finance in the first place...a rollicking, acerbic account of the bubble and its collapse A superbly timed, trenchant analysis of the Anglo-American political culture that has turned the sober profession of banking into a supercasino where the house always wins The arrogance of the view that the boom and bust cycle had been abolished, and the inevitability of the bust are vividly brought out in The Gods That Failed Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson make a formidable team...Deploying a snappy style that keeps the reader's attention through complicated subject matter, they make their case with ease... this is still one of the sharper anti-market critiques available. The conviction that the market will take care of everything went unchallenged until this summer - by the seemingly unlikely combination of two economics editors from the Guardian and the Mail on Sunday In tragic-comic detail, they show how debacles like Northern Rock and banks lending non-existent money to customers has led to disaster for millions of ordinary people, one perpetrated by an unaccountable financial elite whom they dub The New Olympians A riveting and frankly alarming account of the state of the economy... I doubt I will read a more important book this year