There has been an extraordinary amount of good writing about the GFC – as the Australians term the ‘Global Financial Crisis.’
Sure, it’s one of the most important stories of our time. Full of characters, climatic events,
sudden turns in an always evolving plot. As James Lanchester, author of the recently published I.O.U., realized: “I began working on the subject as part of the background to a novel, and soon realized that I had stumbled across the most interesting story I’ve ever found.”
And I.O.U. is the gratifying result. Lanchester has the wit and smarts to entertain while covering a lot of complex ground, never leaving the reader behind. Best of all, he combines perspective from three economies and cultures – the U.S., Britain and Canada.
He knows our recent economic history, and he incorporates comment on our distinctions throughout – particularly the way our government dealt with our banks.
… The 1985 failures of the Canadian Commercial Bank and Northland Bank gave regulators a nasty surprise, just as the Anglo-Saxon liberalization party was starting to kick off.
Canada got a vivid glimpse of what can happen when banks go bad, exactly the moment when the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was persuading countries such as Iceland to rip up the rule book and let the bankers do whatever they wanted.
… In essence, the Canadian example saw the bankers being protected from themselves by the regulators’ reluctance to deregulate.
Highly recommended.
