The Short Goodbye A Skewed History of the Last Boom and the Next Bust

Elizabeth Wynhausen was working at her desk in the newsroom of 'The Australian', writing a story about peple being given the pink slip, when she was given a pink slip of her own. THE SHORT GOODBYE tells the story of the people who were crunched in the 2008 global financial crisis: people like her, who were among the millions retrenched around the world. She talks to former bankers and factory workers, extracting their stories, and along the way, the true cost of the GFC. Above all, she takes apart the rhetoric that the GFC was an essential part of the process of renewal, the destruction that had to happen before a new economy could emerge from the ruins of the old, and global capitalism trumphed again.

Elisabeth Wynhausen is the author of Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market, Manly Girls, and On Resilience. She is a former staff writer for the Australian, the Bulletin, and the National Times.