Economics

Recently I solicited impressions of his job from the new head of external affairs at a big financial organisation. What had struck him first was the manpower at his disposal. The total headcount ran into many hundreds – larger than most if not all Australia’s print and electronic newsrooms. There was not merely one department. Each division of the institution had its own well-resourced team ...

This is not a book with immediate appeal for the general reader, who is likely to be deterred by the denseness of its analysis. That is unfortunate, because its message deserves to be widely disseminated. It provides a useful account of economic history since the end of World War II, both internationally and ...

What’s an accountant’s favourite book? 50 Shades of Grey. But in a world of transfer pricing and Special Purpose Entities, suddenly accounting isn’t funny anymore. A 1976 Congressional report noted that the Big Eight accounting firms controlled ‘virtually all aspects of accounting and auditing in the US’ ...

The blurb on the back of the book describes Varoufakis as ‘the most interesting man in the world’. It is a wonderful epithet and might even be true considering the interest that Varoufakis excites in the press and media. On another reading, he is also the luckiest man in the world given the extraordinary nature of his leap from talented if unheralded academic economist to Greek finance minister to international speaker and best-selling author. This is an important as well as an entertaining work: part diary, part critique of European political economy, and part thriller featuring a cast of villains of whom Ian Fleming would be proud. It is a heady concoction and a gripping read.

Given the damage done to the global economy by the finance industry this century, and the apparent determination of its major players to keep on doing it, this would ...

Thomas Piketty is of course the French economist who shot to fame, somewhat improbably, on the back of an 800-page tub thumper Capital in the Twenty-First Century ...