Possible Futures

Volume I, Business As Usual Much more basic than the result of a few financial traders cheating the system, Business as Usualshows how the current financial crisis was made possible by both neoliberal financial reforms and a massive turning away from manufacturing things of value to make profits from trading financial assets. In original essays, the contributors establish how the Great Recession is related to crises of the past, and yet why this meltdown was different. The volume concludes by asking whether the crisis--despite its severity--contains seeds of a new global economy, what role the US will play, and whether China or other countries will rise to global leadership. Volume II, The Deepening Crisis Response to financial meltdown is entangled with basic challenges to global governance. Environment, global security, and ethnicity and nationalism are all global issues today. Focusing on the political and social dimensions of the crisis, contributors examine changes in relationships between the world's richer and poorer countries, efforts to strengthen global institutions, and difficulties facing states trying to create stability for their citizens. Volume III, Aftermath The global financial crisis showed deep problems with mainstream economic predictions, as well as the vulnerability of the world's richest countries and the enormous potential of some poorer ones. China, India, Brazil and other countries are growing faster than Europe or America and have weathered the crisis better.Is their growth due to following conventional economic guidelines or to strong state leadership and sometimes protectionism? These issues are basic to the question of which countries will grow in coming decades, as well as the likely conflicts over global trade policy, currency standards, and economic cooperation.