Summary
On the 19 February 1986 the Financial Times published my article ‘Why the World Economy Needs a Financial Crash’. That article had a devastating effect on my career, leading to my virtual blacklisting in the financial institutions of the City of London. The loss of my job imposed new stresses and insecurities on my young family. It also changed the course of my intellectual development and transformed my outlook on the discussions of policy and theory that are supposed to be the vehicle for the progress of reason in economics and politics. The article was written in the belief that, in contrast to the engaged writer in an authoritarian regime, we live in an intellectual democracy in which ideas and analysis are evaluated on their merits. Publication of my article marked the turning point to my realisation that the market-place for ideas is the playground of coteries vying for or exercising power. In that playground, a special place is reserved for the media whose function is ‘as an opinion board telling individual agents in the market what average or conventional opinion is at any one time’. (Josef Steindl went even further and suggested that the particular coteries, or ‘opinion-leaders’ dominate that playground, forming the expectations of participants in financial markets to maintain a certain speculative enthusiasm or deflationary temper in those markets. Arguably financial economics functions in much the same way.)
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- Why the World Economy Needs a Financial Crash and Other Critical Essays on Finance and Financial Economics , pp. vii - xivPublisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010