Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed
by Paul Mason
Verso, £7.99

IF THERE is one boom caused by the global financial bust then it’s in books telling us how it all happened. Paul Mason, Newsnight’s (relatively) new economics editor, got to cover the biggest economics story of the last 70 years and could hardly believe what he was reporting. The one constant through the breathless prose is the sound of his jaw dropping as another low is breached.

The book is, roughly, in three sections. The initial part is the traditional bit where a journalist talks in the present tense as events unfold around him. Mason is always being woken up at some ungodly hour to be told that yet another venerable institution has gone belly up and then has to rush off to stand outside a big glass building or watch the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, give a press conference. There are nice details here, such as the body language of Treasury officials betraying their terror.

Having set the scene, Mason then tries to put the crisis in context. Some of this will please supporters of the position that it’s all the fault of America. For Mason it stems from deregulation during the Clinton presidency combined with a complete lack of oversight by all the institutions we usually rely on. And that includes the media.

As the mind-boggling sums of money accumulated nobody thought to peek behind the curtain. It’s here that Mason sticks it to Gordon Brown. Second only to America in cheering on this gigantic house of cards was the Labour government and its then chancellor. It had, he says, given up on manufacturing as a basis for the country’s prosperity and bet everything on the City of London.

Mason does not spare us the complex details of the financial deals. Reassuringly he tells us that MPs have been left holding their heads in their hands having tried to similarly fathom where the money went. A glossary of terms at the back helps you get through this.

He also makes the vital point that the collapse has already had a direct and savage impact on the poorest. Swathes of urban America have been cleansed of people who defaulted on their mortgages as industries folded. Meanwhile the short lived commodity bubble priced food out of the reach of millions of people in the developing world.

In the short final section of his book, Mason suggests how this changed financial and political landscape might develop. He sees an opportunity to institute systems “shaped by the willingness of ordinary people to impose limits, standards and sustainability on capital”.

Being such a short, and somewhat rushed, conclusion it doesn’t quite have the force it might have had. But this is still a succinct and well-structured post mortem on the last days of casino capitalism.

Phil Chamberlain