A new book

On October 29th, 2009, the 80th anniversary of Black Tuesday, WND Books will publish The Return of the Great Depression, a book addressing the economic contraction of 2008-09, the reasons for its occurrence, and its implications for the future.  Beginning with my experience in Japan at the height of the Heisei boom twenty years before the global financial crisis, the book delves into economic theory and economic history in constructing a perspective on the likely outcome for the global economy over the next ten years.

A number of pre-release readers have been kind enough to express their opinion of the book.  One of them is the notorious financial writer known as The Mogambo Guru, who in his Inimitable Mogambo Manner, (IMM), provided an amusing and colorful blurb that the publisher absolutely refused to consider printing on the dust jacket, mostly because doing so would preclude putting anything else there.  Since the notion that there could possibly be anything that needs to be said about a book that has not already been said by the Mighty Mogambo is clearly a ludicrous one that hardly merits articulation, let alone consideration, it gives me great pleasure to share with you The Mogambo Guru’s verdict.

“I heartily recommend Vox Day’s book, The Return of the Great Depression, although it is a case of a smart guy writing a smart book full of serious-yet-fascinating smart-guy economic stuff about the shameless shenanigans of the last 20 years or so, and is such a varied feast of economic and financial information and insights that a poor, borderline mental defective like me could never finish reading all of it, much less comprehending any of it, despite the highly-illuminating original graphs and charts, although I wish, I wish, I wish I could, especially in light of today’s economic turmoil.

So my recommendation is based on a shameful scheme of raw desperation and deception, which is to leave a copy on my desk, where people passing by would see it and they would think to themselves “Oh! He must be a smart guy to read such a book! We ought to fire him last!”

In my defense, if you have as little going for you as I do, you increasingly find that you must rely on those kinds of intangible goodwill benefits, hence the recommendation to buy and use the book, although one must but marvel at how much I would benefit from being able to read it!

Which I hope you can!”

And which I hope you will.  An amount of the material will be familiar to the readers of this blog, but most of it is either new or examined in more detail than is usually the case in the columns and blog posts. Among other things, the book goes into considerably more detail on Keynesian general theory,  Friedmanite monetarism, and Paul Samuelson’s conversion of general theory into modern applied Neo-Keynesian macroeconomics than I customarily do here, as it was my goal that the book will not be of benefit only to those who happen to read the book during the present situation, but also for those who do so well after the crisis has passed.

But that, as the book explains, is probably going to take a while. In the meantime, serious econobloggers and financial writers who are interested in reviews or interviews can contact me via email.