A well-written explanation of the roots of the current financial crisis; clear, structured, and intelligent.

The elements of the crisis are all dealt with seperately and comprehensibly, first in Britain then worldwide, with a plentiful dose of historical context, and chapters on oil and food supplies. This is then followed by a chapter on the major "emerging" economies and how they tie into the big picture, and one on how the world has responded to it. Here, he neatly ties up his personal approach, explaining how economic liberalism should be tied in with social democracy, and leads us into the final chapter, which is a (vague) roadmap as to where we can go from here.

The political angle is present throughout, but is relatively muted; Cable takes it for granted that you know he's coming at it from a certain stance, he briefly explains it on a couple of occasions, but other than that he lets it slide. It's not a polemic, and it's not partisan point-scoring - though there is one moment where he quotes himself from Hansard some years ago, predicting terrible things - which is always a reassuring thing from a book written by a politician.

The pressures of time show through occasionally; there's a couple of obvious copyediting errors, the publisher's boilerplate seems to think the author is a woman, and the introduction has a prominent quote by Marx which, whilst popularly quoted around the time the book went to press, quickly turned out to be fake.

It's good, I think. Calm, reasoned, and tries hard to lift us out of the context of the finance industry's problems in order to note the other major issues, commodity prices and the shift in economic power. There's a bibliography for each chapter, rather than specific footnotes, though much of it is drawn from contemporary journalism rather than anything formally published. Hopefully this, and the various errors, will be improved in a later paperback edition - I've no doubt we'll see one by the end of the year.