After half a century of covering all manner of financial crises, one of Britain’s most senior economics journalists has no difficulty in identifying the very worst of them. Can you guess what it is?

I got a shock when I first saw the cover of Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy from Devaluation to Brexit. Have I really been around that long? Was there nothing better to do? Despite the horrors – three serious recessions, Black Wednesday, austerity and now Brexit – I have loved pretty much every minute of it. My only regret is that I failed in my intention to follow my career as an economics journalist with a career as a bestselling novelist. There’s still time.

From the age of seven, when all my contemporaries had set their sights on becoming engine drivers or professional footballers, I wanted to be a journalist. What I had not expected was that I would end up being an economics journalist. There are some very distinguished general reporters, but most journalists eventually find themselves becoming specialists, and that is what happened to me. It was a natural progression from taking a job on the Financial Times.

At first the British economic policymakers I got to know were grappling with what they regarded as “the problems of relative decline”. People were writing letters to The Times in the late-nineteenth century about the way the German and US economies were catching up with, or overtaking, the UK. But it is not widely appreciated that Britain’s percentage of world trade held up impressively well into the twentieth century.

What did for the British economy was the Second World War, which nearly bankrupted us. The immediate post-war era of the Attlee government were years of enforced austerity. It was a recognition that productive resources would be limited for years until the economy could be rebuilt, not a “policy choice”. That did not occur until many years later, under George Osborne’s chancellorship.