Nine Crises
WILLIAM KEEGAN
(biteback publishing, 304 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

As we teeter on the brink of Brexit, it is salutary to be reminded that we have stumbled from one crisis to the next for the past 50 years.

In this excellent book, William Keegan revisits these crises, from the devaluation and balance of payments problems of 1967 to the present day. He has had a privileged seat in the stalls, working in the Bank of England, then at the Financial Times, and more recently as economics editor at The Observer.

The crises in the 1960s were invariably related to oil, but since the discovery of oil and gas in the North Sea they have often been ­triggered by poor judgement, political and ­economic. In 1976 it was the International Monetary Fund, obsessed with the public sector borrowing requirement, and the way in which Margaret Thatcher was seduced by Milton Friedman’s monetarism into believing that inflation would be controlled by controlling the money supply. Instead unemployment rose to three million and inflation to 20 per cent.