The Gods that Failed

Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson
February 2009     ISBN: 1568586027

Between September 7 and October 7, 2008, the great global chain letter that had been the turbo-charged free-market economy ran out of subscribers. This was the month in which the bill for 15 years of excess was presented in full—a bill that Wall Street, the City of London and other financial centers were quite incapable of paying. As a result, governments in Washington, London and continental Europe stepped in with direct and indirect financial support totaling trillions of dollars.

The Gods That Failed tells the story of the financial elite who have brought us to financial collapse. It shows how, over the past three decades, democratic governments have ceded control of the world economy to a new elite of super-rich, free-market operatives in national and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization. They praised economic stability but have delivered chaos. It promised the bracing air of financial freedom but in the end relied on a taxpayer bailout. These latter-day masters of the universe are bankrupt, financially and intellectually.

Two of the world's most formidable financial journalists engage in a remorselessly forensic dissection of this financial elite, tracing their origins to a secretive gathering of free-market economists in 1947, and exposing how its agenda—to unleash market forces into every sphere of public life, to privatize and to downsize the state—was realized, piece by piece, over the years. The authors propose a series of far-reaching reforms to save us from a new depression. The financial elite told us for years that there was no alternative to its agenda. There is an alternative, and The Gods That Failed shows the way.

"Like real-life Hercule Poirots...[they] assemble the suspects...and identify the guilty party...most entertaining."
—The Economist

"The book is a rollicking, acerbic account of the bubble and its collapse."
—Daily Telegraph Books of the Year (UK)

"A superbly timed, trenchant analysis of the Anglo-American political culture that has turned the sober profession of banking into a supercasino where the house always wins."
—Misha Glenny, author of McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

"Elliott and Atkinson take many individuals—both contemporary and historical—to task for allowing market crashes to occur in the name of greed. Mostly, however, the authors blame the underlying faith in free market economies... [They] offer proposed solutions, but little hope. After all, changes in the behavior of greed cannot come from legislators or government regulators."
—USA Today

Larry Elliott is the economics editor of the Guardian and has been since 1994. He has been writing about economics since 1986. He studied at Cambridge and has been the journalist trustee on the Scott Trust (the body that runs the Guardian) for the past seven years. He is married with two teenage daughters and lives in St. Albans, England.

Dan Atkinson is the economics editor of The Mail on Sunday, one of Britain's highest circulation newspapers. He has been a business journalist since 1983 and has specialized in economic affairs since 2000. He is married with three sons and lives in Sussex, England.

The Gods That Failed is their third collaboration following The Age of Insecurity (1998) and Fantasy Island (2007).