Sunday Posts

I am keeping my reading pledge of completing a book a week. This week, I completed Benn Steils The Battle of Bretton Woods , a fascinating saga of the emergence of the Bretton Woods system, with all the key actors, politics, achievements and disappointments. Not an easy read, it was monetary economics side by side with personal drama and high politics of International relations, it was nevertheless worthwhile the effort.  Aptly titled, the Battle captures the competition between Britain, embroiled in war, and the United States, for global dominance in the post-war world. The story, at the same time, is also of the competition between the old and the new world, that of waspish brilliance of Lord Keynes pitted against the bureaucratic single-mindedness of Harry Dexter White, the clash between imperial hangovers and commercial brutality. Lurking behind the scenes, adequately represented in the story, is the Soviet mechanisation, manipulating the world affairs through plain brib...

I pledged to myself to read a book a week and write a short review here. The first book that I read under this pledge is Martin Wolf's 'The Shift and The Shocks : What We Have Learned - And Have Still To Learn - From The Financial Crisis' . A summary judgement, in the tradition of Amazon, is that this is a 5-star, absolutely brilliant book to read on the Financial Crisis and its causes. Martin Wolf, who I saw as an apologist of Globalisation and principally writes in the Financial Times, would not usually be an author I would start my reading pledge with, and it needed some persuasion from a friend whose I advise I value greatly and who suggested, accurately as I understand now, that if one has to read just one book about the financial crisis, this should be it. It is, as is clear from the title, about the financial crisis that started in 2007 and shaped our lives in many ways. The boom years before 2007 is now a distant memory for many of us, and though some countries...