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agreement on behalf of the independent Fed. And with Congress already having
limited the Fed’s crisis-fighting powers to prevent a repeat of the unpopular
2008 bailouts, adding more constraints might leave the Fed too feeble to fight a
new crisis.
O’Sullivan offers many of the by now standard observations about the after-
math of the financial crisis: inequality too high, economic growth overly finan-
cialized, voters excessively disenchanted. The system, he writes, is overdue for a
cleaning out. He notes that a previous era of globalization in the early 20th cen-
tury collapsed into World War I. “Our future could be a grisly repeat of 1913, the
last time globalization came to an end,” he writes.
The author certainly earns points for originality. Central banks, he writes,
could become the “monetary battleships” of future currency wars. The system
that O’Sullivan envisions replacing globalization will be multipolar, centered on
three geographic powers he likens (somewhat clumsily) to novelist George Or-
well’s Eastasia (China-centric Asia), Oceania (the U.S. and U.K.), and Eurasia
(the European Union, Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Israel). And O’Sullivan
rightly identifies the centrifugal forces tearing at established political parties as he
forecasts the rise of new groupings. But his prediction that a new environmental
party will be permitted to operate in Xi Jinping’s China will strike many readers
as unimaginable. And his argument is often hamstrung by a repetitive writing
style and the off-putting habit of name-dropping the work of authors like George
Orwell, J.D. Vance, and Thomas Piketty.
Although readers will appreciate The Levelling’s reliance on history to illumi-
nate our present, they should be skeptical of the vision of the future it presents. +
David J. Lynch
[email protected]
covers the global economy for
the Washington Post. He is the
author of When the Luck of the
Irish Ran Out: The World’s Most
Resilient Economy and Its
Struggle to Rise Again.