BUSINESS BOOKS:In troubled times information-hungry people look to the book shelves for context and advice . But have the publishing houses kept pace with events?
'WE ARE living through a crisis which nobody has been able to understand. The political and business elite are flying blind. This crisis has barely started and remains completely out of control." That's according to British commentator Martin Jacques in the New Statesmanon February 16th, 2009.
But that is not how Brian Cowen and Gordon Brown see it. Both are taking “prudent targeted” measures to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Brown is marshalling all the king’s horses with a huge reflationary package of cutting VAT and borrowing to get people spending and maintain employment.
Meanwhile, Cowen is reluctantly cutting public spending and increasing VAT to stay within hailing distance of euro zone regulations, in the certain knowledge that many of the Republic’s men and women will lose their jobs as a result. And young people are being asked to fund third-level education without prior warning or a period of saving, while their elders contemplate a long period of negative-equity home ownership.
They cannot both be right, can they? Assume one is wrong. If it’s Cowen, the Republic is heading for a dreadful scenario involving unemployment on an unmanageable scale. If Brown is wrong, the UK, including Northern Ireland, faces the same. One country or the other is going to have a sick neighbour, with few resources to sustain itself, let alone buy the goods and services of the other country.
What if both fail?
Yet much of the discussion and commentary – on both sides of the Irish Sea – deal with less fundamental issues. How much did Department of Finance mandarins tell Brian Lenihan about Anglo-Irish loan swaps with Irish Life Permanent? When did Gordon Brown discover that Northern Rock was a basket case? Important political questions, but the answers bring us no closer to fixing economies in freefall, or halting the cruel rounds of redundancies and the dismantling of our public services which took so long to build up.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun,” the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us. And the textbooks agree: economies are cyclical. But what else can the theorists tell us?
Big questions demand big brains to solve them. Yet visits to various bookshops in Dublin and London in recent weeks yielded no sightings of business titles and blank looks from staff unfamiliar with any real discussion of the banking crisis between hard or soft covers. Now if you want books about Barack Obama, or the latest from Cathy Kelly, that is a different matter.
Sure, the bestsellers list may include self-help titles from the likes of Stephen Covey, but serious analysis or thinking about the credit crunch cannot be found.
However, John Lewis, head of business book buying for Waterstones in the UK, disagrees that the banking crisis and credit crunch are not being seriously addressed on the bookshelves. Serious analysis for the thoughtful reader could be found, he says, in recent publications such as Panic: The story of Modern Financial Insanityby Michael Lewis, Return of Depression Economicsby Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, The Gods that Failedby Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, and A New Paradigm for Financial Marketsby George Soros.
According to Lewis, the marketing of business books varies from branch to branch, but all are well-stocked, and the perception that serious business books are not being “merchandised” in the current economic climate is mistaken.
Harvard professor of history Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, a tie-in with a TV documentary, did not feature in WH Smith's list. "Cruelly overtaken by events" was reviewer Tristram Hunt's verdict, although other reviewers found value in its scholarship and readability. In Ferguson's defence, it is unfair to expect a wide-ranging history of money to explain in detail what caused the first run on a British bank in more than a century in September 2007.
Looking at a list of forthcoming publications from Allen Lane, Penguin's prestige imprint, we shouldn't hold our breath for a rival to JM Keynes's 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, any time soon. In fact, some of the authors may be kicking to touch. Martin Jacques' When China Rules the World is due in June 2009 and Tristram Hunt is playing it safe with The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, due in April.
The BBC's chief economics correspondent Hugh Pym does not believe the game is over, so he and colleague Nick Kochan of the Financial Timeswrote What Happened? as a basic primer for the general reader. It was published late in 2008.
"Our book is not supposed to be an authoritative account or a full narrative, it is too early for that. But it does explain the terms and gives a straightforward account of where we are at the moment, in language accessible to someone who is not a regular reader of the financial pages. And at 120 pages it does not demand a huge investment of time," Pym told The Irish Times.
The Mail on Sundaysummarised What Happened? thus: "They answer dozens of the basic questions we are all now asking: Is my pension affected? How bad will the recession be? And what on earth has happened to Iceland? The answers being, respectively: I'm afraid so; possibly dreadful; and it went bust and is currently being bailed out by the IMF and the Russians." The Observer said it might have been the most hastily-produced book of all time, but praised its efficient answers to pertinent questions.
Meanwhile, journalism is doing a useful job of filling in the details of individual bank collapses and the mistakes made by hapless leaders, but the real problem – how to repair the keystone of the economy, the banking sector – tends to be overlooked, in favour of more interesting speculations about what Seán FitzPatrick got up to. And what did Irish Life Permanent chairwoman Gillian Bowler really know – and when?
But for some of us, the damage sustained while we wait for better conditions in which to form judgments will not be reversible. We could do with knowing how all Cowen’s men (and women) are going to put the economy together again.
Brought to book: The trouble with writing on the banking crisis
WRITING BOOKS and essays on subjects affected by the banking crisis is a nightmare at present, says Jonathan Fenby, a British author who specialises in commentary on China and France. "Writers on the global economy have a real problem in getting books published before they go out of date," he told The Irish TImes. "There's no certainty that we are at the bottom of this current cycle , we don't know that there are no further great shocks to come. One could write about the present chaotic financial markets, and the judgments may be right but there's no way of knowing yet."
Paradoxically, in his own case, the publishing cycle has worked in his favour.
" My Penguin History of Modern China, published last year, had gone out of print and was due to go into paperback. In December I began madly updating the introduction, heavily revising one chapter and adding an epilogue which reflected the financial changes of the past few tumultuous months, reducing the growth forecasts in the hardcover version, including the Szechuan earthquake, and the arrest of dissidents, for publication in March 2009."
But the difference is that he works on a broad economic, social and financial canvas.
Fenby, a former editor of the Observerand the South China Morning Post, says that the absence of books making a meaningful contribution to the debate on how to handle the financial maelstrom brings newer channels of communication into play. Blogs and semi-blogs are filling the vacuum, up to a point. He is commissioned to write weekly pieces on China and France for the Guardian'sonline forum, Comment is Free.
"I notice that the comments readers send in are becoming more interesting. In the past too many of them were of the 'send him back to the Daily Mail' [to which he occasionally contributes opinion pieces] stripe, but recently there's been a big improvement."
Fenby has also written for this magazine on the subject of Chinese industrial expansionism. The problem of distance and perspective remains. When the storm is raging, the imperative is to make for calmer waters before the assessment can take place. Fenby does not have this problem with the book he is now working on. Its subject is Charles de Gaulle.
