Given the enormous impact of the 2008 financial crash and post-crash austerity on so many people’s lives, several years on and it is hardly surprising that a veritable torrent of books has poured forth on this subject – mostly written by academics and journalists, but there have also been some by politicians, (former) regulators and market traders who were close to the action.

Interestingly, and disturbingly, many of the people who might have been expected to see the crisis coming – professional economists and financial and business journalists, for the most part – were caught unawares by it, more or less disqualifying themselves as credible commentators thereafter. To be fair, some prominent US-based economists did go public on their concerns about the housing bubble and the dangerous levels of risk building up in the financial system, but their warnings were dismissed by the true believers in the Panglossian orthodoxy (also known as the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’) that all was well with the financial markets, in the best of all possible worlds – that is, the Anglo-American world of free markets and light-touch regulation (Krugman, 2009).

In fact, there were quite a few Cassandras – economists and at least one US watchdog (regulator) – who saw some sort of financial crisis coming, but no one in a position of power and authority, whether politicians, central bankers or within the economics profession itself, wanted to listen to them (Galbraith, 2009). The watchdog who barked was Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1996 to 1999, whose warnings about the dangers posed by the huge and growing market in unregulated financial derivatives went unheeded by the Clinton administration and were disavowed by fellow-regulators.

Yes, it’s a crowded market, but I do believe that there is room for an addition to the literature that is reasonably short and designed as an entry-level guide to the global financial crisis and its consequences.

Let me elaborate a little on the spirit in which I have written this book. As a retired university teacher, I want to retain the scholarly virtues of rigorous analysis, critical reflection and proper referencing of other people’s work. I also want to avoid the characteristic academic vice of writing in a kind of vernacular or ‘private language’ that makes what is being written inaccessible to outsiders.