A thought provoking book that does an admirable job of connecting the dots between energy and financial markets, and the political and geopolitical challenges the world has been facing.

Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century - Google Books Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century - Google Books

Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan casts a shadow on the wall as he speaks about the current status of the U.S. economy But the most difficult sections deal with the Eurozone and the impact of its problematic construction on European unity, especially where Britain is concerned. She argues that ‘the Eurozone crisis set in motion the path [ sic] that led Britain out of the EU. Of course, the crisis did not determine Brexit.’ Well, I hear you ask, did it or didn’t it? Essentially her view is that it did. ‘The Eurozone crisis destabilized the relationship between the EU and the Eurozone, unravelling British membership of the EU.’ How so? Because the European Central Bank (ECB) chose to prioritise the fight against inflation, slowing the European recovery from the financial crisis, and increasing unemployment in the southern countries in particular.

So the first history she explores is a geopolitical one, revolving around energy and beginning with the rise of the US as a great power at the time of the emergence of oil as the chief energy source, replacing coal. The second history is economic and starts with the breakdown of the post WWII Bretton Woods monetary system in the early 70s and the emergence of fiat currencies. The third and final history is about democracies and how the geopolitical and economic changes of the 70s pressured democratic politics. The Suez crisis also led to the creation of the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), and helped propel France’s turn to nuclear power, after a period in which it had hoped to supply Europe with oil from its Algerian colony, after the discovery of oil there in 1956. This ended with France’s loss of control of Algeria in 1962, though France was able to retain control of its Saharan oil fields in the Évian Accords until they were nationalised in the early 1970s. Britain, for its part, encouraged British Petroleum (the former Anglo-Persian Company) to explore for oil in the Western Hemisphere, but retained oil operations in what was still the British protectorate of Kuwait, and, like the French, sought to develop a domestic nuclear industry – tied, of course, to military nuclear strategy. The book examines the global political economy with an emphasis on how dollar has become even more important in global transactions weakening American monetary power over America's domestic economy while magnifying the importance of its decisions on foreign nations which need prompt help in tough times which is not always forthcoming. I am not an economist so I am not really able to be super critical of her claims but they seemed reasonable and I found her arguments interesting, especially the critical role of eurodollar markets and the difficult strictures the eurozone is in. Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and also Deputy Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the author of Oil and the western economic crisis (2017); China and the mortgaging of America (2010); and Might, right, prosperity and consent: representative democracy and the international economy(2008). Since 2015, Helen ha...

Disorder ebook by Helen Thompson - Rakuten Kobo Disorder ebook by Helen Thompson - Rakuten Kobo

Most egregiously, the slowdown in China’s growth rate that began in 2011 had nothing to do with “the ongoing risks around dollar shortage problems in Eurodollar markets.” Instead, it was a deliberate policy choice by Chinese officials who wanted to curtail the unnecessary and environmentally destructive construction projects that were launched in response to the global financial crisis. Thompson writes Chinese leaders were worried “that China’s dollar debt vulnerability had trapped the country in a lower growth paradigm.” Yet she cites a People’s Daily article from 2016 that warned against another yuan-denominated borrowing surge and welcomed slower growth because “China has to make a choice between quantity and quality.”You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

Disorder – Hard Times in the 21st Century by Book review: Disorder – Hard Times in the 21st Century by

It is a dense book. While the absence of superfluous words is welcome, it surely could have been made easier to read. The focus of the book is on the “disruptions” of the last decade. The antecedents of this period date notably from the 1970s. The “book starts from the premise that several histories are necessary to identify the casual forces at work and a conviction these histories must overlap.” This statement launched the core of the book - the three sections (histories): geopolitics, the economy, and democratic politics. By 2005, Germany had reached several turning points. Economically, the re-emergence of a long-term preference for export-led growth and a large trade surplus left the Eurozone structurally divided, with the deficit states stripped of the safeguard of devaluation the ERM had once provided. Democratically, the 2005 German election began the era of grand coalition politics: between 1949 and 2004, a grand coalition had governed in Germany for less than three years; after the 2005 general election, a grand coalition had, by the start of 2021, governed Germany for all but four years. Geopolitically, a reunified Germany was beginning to reshape Europe’s energy geography. In 2005, Gerhard Schroeder’s government signed the agreement with Russia to construct the first Nord Stream pipeline, threatening Ukraine’s future as an energy transit state for Europe and diminishing Turkey’s utility as one. In the same year, Viktor Yushchenko became president of Ukraine and set about trying to achieve EU and NATO membership while Turkey began EU accession talks.The economic story begins in the 1970s and explains how the rise of the Eurodollar system and the decade's energy crises remade the monetary world and the European Union, and how the Federal Reserve and China's response to the 2007-8 crash in preventing an economic collapse let lose a succession of economic and energy problems that cannot now be resolved. The author is clearly someone with a thorough knowledge in her field, and this is a must read book. In this absorbing and wide-ranging study Helen Thompson unravels the complex intersections of oil, money, and democracy for understanding the politics of the last century. She provides an indispensable and illuminating guide to our current predicaments. The book covers a great deal of ground. The first section emphasises the role that oil consumption has had on the choices policymakers can make. She offers a particularly interesting history of how the Suez crisis shaped the choices facing european politicians and how this created a dependency on Russian exports which obviously created lasting divisions. Oil remade the geopolitics of the 20th century and I enjoyed her history of the attempts goverments made to control this resource and the subsequent challenges this created - both for energy exporters and importers. economic recessions in the 2000s generated by uncontrolled deployment of the very la