This key chapter opens with background assumptions (full employment is not assumed, the financial sector is key, and unemployment is an unnecessary evil) and then starts building a basic macro model based on the injection-leakages approach. It identifies physical investment spending as the key injection and then spends considerable time explaining the determinants of investment and the environment in which relevant decisions are made. This is perhaps the most complex part of the volume, but real-world data are referenced frequently in the hope that this makes the argument easier to follow. About halfway through the chapter, there is a shift in focus toward the financing of investment. This requires a discussion of banking and credit/money creation. The chapter ends with miscellanea regarding investment spending (including some specific observations from Kalecki and Mitchell).

Neoclassical economics – especially macro – is a mess. It has become irrelevant and divorced from the real world. Unfortunately, theory is important because it informs policy. This volume takes an alternate approach, one following the work of earlier Institutionalist and Post Keynesian pioneers.

The chapter opens with a quick review of the preceding theory and an outline of what one should expect to see in the real world if that theory is relevant. Several data points are selected as being the most significant, and the manner in which they fit on average over the entire period is demonstrated. These same data points are then repeated within each cycle as the chapter continues. Ten expansions and recessions are explained, including considerable detail as drawn from contemporary and later accounts. On occasion, there are side trips to related concepts such as shifting income distributions, the dramatic decline in the labor force participation ratio, secular stagnation, and the financialization of the economy.

Economics is ultimately about policy. To this point, the volume has laid out a theory that explains business cycles, inflation, monetary and fiscal policy, and the financial sector, and it has tested its predictions by comparing them to historical events. It has also referenced the major economic and social costs associated with both the business cycle and the general tendency of the economy to come to rest at less than full employment. Fortunately, there exists a policy that can address these: the Job Guarantee. The chapter (vetted by two preeminent scholars in the area: Pavlina Tcherneva and L. Randall Wray) goes into detail on the structure, strengths, weaknesses, and financing of such a program. It concludes that there is no doubt that we are suffering needlessly. Unemployment is an unnecessary evil, and we absolutely can afford to address emerging crises such as elder care, income maldistribution, and global climate change. Indeed, we cannot afford not to.

An extraordinary development occurred in the Australian economy in the last quarter of 2008: for the first time since the first half of 1991, gross domestic product (GDP) declined. But even more extraordinarily – and despite the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s assertion that ‘the worst global economic recession in 75 years means it is inevitable that Australia too will be dragged into recession’ – data for the first quarter of 2009 showed that the economy had resumed growth. Among the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Australia alone avoided recession as conventionally defined (two consecutive quarters of negative growth in GDP).

Chapter 8 focusses on the region’s recent history of sustained economic decline and political change and conflict. It explains the reasons for this crisis and the role of indebtedness, political corruption and the imposition of austerity and market-oriented policies in reducing living standards and necessitating the ‘reform’ of the mining industry and Copperbelt societies. The chapter explores the rising local opposition to both these policies and to political repression and the contrasting experiences of political change in the early 1990s, with Zambia transitioning to multi-party democracy while Congo was mired in profound social crisis and military conflict. It then explores the liberalisation of both economies and the privatisation of the mining industry, associated in the Copperbelt with the loss of formal-sector jobs, falling living standards and the loss of company social provision. The chapter uses interviews to explore local understandings of this period of decline and political change and how social scientists have explained this extended period of decline.

The recession of the 1970s saw the advent of financialised capitalism and a renewed focus on cost containment in health care. At the same time, new identity politics had displaced the old politics of distribution associated with the welfare state. The political contraction of the welfare state, together with the spread of ‘precarity’ in employment via zero-hours contracts, and the undermining of work conditions, sick pay and pensions have been facilitated by a recasting of personal responsibility. Strong flows of biological, psychological, social, cultural, spatial, symbolic and, especially, material asset flows are conducive to good health and longevity, while weak flows are associated with poor health and premature death. Ideological assaults on the welfare state have been major contributors to growing material and social inequalities. Financial capitalism has witnessed an accelerating rate of mental as well as physical health problems in line with the fracturing of society. The period 1960–2010 set the scene for what many at the time of writing (2020) see as a severe crisis in welfare care.

The arrival of 19,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after 1979 came after nearly two decades of immigration restriction, when Britain was entering its deepest recession for fifty years and just as Thatcher’s New Right government’s marketisation and anti-statist policies were being enacted. If this signalled new and significant challenges facing these refugees to Britain, this chapter shows that the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam also saw a number of significant continuities with earlier periods. Internationally, this included the continued importance of colonial and Cold War geopolitical considerations, which pushed Britain into reluctantly participating in the UNHCR-led Vietnamese resettlement programme. Domestically the reception programme emphasised the ongoing importance of voluntary action and revealed the persistence of housing problems, poverty and racism for the new arrivals. This all took place against the backdrop of the continued emergence of an ever more diverse – ‘multicultural’ – society where the state and refugee agencies alike were being reshaped by their own increasingly heterogeneous workforces. And yet, despite this apparent new openness, educational and linguistic disadvantages of the refugees themselves collided with limited state support and high levels of unemployment to ensure that the Vietnamese were often only able to establish lives for themselves at the margins of British society.

This chapter examines a number of postapocalyptic Irish films produced and released in the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland. It considers the ways in which three of these films in particular, Conor Horgan’s One Hundred Mornings (2009), Stephen Fingleton’s The Survivalist (2015), and David Freyne’s The Cured (2017), represent both the state of the nation in the wake of fiscal catastrophe and its future self-projections: the “post” of “postapocalypse.” The films depict bleak presents, clearly reflecting the socioeconomic context of recession and austerity in which they were made. Yet they also offer bleak futures, with limited potential for transformation or growth. The sites of resistance to neoliberal dystopia that emerge within the films, especially those based on reconstruction of a premodern, pastoral community as an ethical alternative to capitalist subjectivities (a key signifier of the postapocalyptic genre), are profoundly ambivalent and contingent. Thus, the chapter argues, the postapocalyptic cycle of Irish cinema represents a key cultural engagement with the economic discourses of recovery and restoration that emerged almost simultaneously with discourses of crisis in Ireland.

A central bank is expected to produce results that are generally beneficial to the people to whom (through parliament) it is accountable. In the late twentieth century, the belief that monetary policy was a tool in fighting short-run economic problems gave way to thinking about monetary stability as providing a framework within which better informed judgements about long-run decisions could be made. The period is punctuated by two traumatic recessions. The early 1980s collapse in large part was the intentional result of a radical change in macro-economic strategy; the second was a product of the aftermath of a loose money period with excessive credit growth and then a collapse of a housing bubble. Both occurred in a wider international economic setting: in the early 1980s in the wake of the second oil price shock and of the 1979 anti-inflationary turn in US monetary policy; in the early 1990s the responses to the fiscal and monetary shock of German unification, a US slowdown and a new oil price spike after the first Gulf War. In both cases, the UK output performance was significantly poorer than that of other major industrial countries.

In October 1990, after a sustained campaign from the Treasury, the UK joined the European Monetary System’s Exchange Rate Mechanism. The move was heavily supported by Leigh-Pemberton, who persuaded the US central banker, Alan Greenspan, to persuade Margaret Thatcher that the ERM was a modern version of the nineteenth century gold standard. UK entry into the EMS ERM was accompanied by an interest rate cut, but the consequences of German unification and of German interest rate moves led to tightening of monetary policy at a moment of UK recession. In September 1992, the UK’s exchange rate became unsustainable as very large speculative flows bet on a UK exit from the mechanism (September 16). The result was initially seen as a massive humiliation for the UK and its monetary policy-makers, Black Wednesday, but quite quickly opinion shifted to considering it as a liberation that allowed policy reform, White Wednesday. The UK’s ERM experience thus became a game-changer in thinking about monetary policy and exchange rates.