Under the headline The Indispensable Nation, Tony Barber reviewed in the Financial Times on Feb 8, 2013 two books; the first on the global economic order built after WWII; the second, on the decline and fall of that order.

In the first, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order, Benn Steil desribes the «political chicanery, bureaucratic skulduggery, espionage, hard economic detail and the acid humor» of the men who created the global monetary system centred on the dollar and U.S. hegemony in the second half of the 20th Century.

In the second, The Leaderless Economy: Why the World Economic System Fell Apart and How to Fix It, Peter Temin and David Vines «extend the story that Steil concludes at Bretton Woods, charting the decline  and fall of US-dominated international order that it inaugurated».

They contend that «the world has not recovered from the banking crisis that erupted in 2008 largely because, unlike in the 1940s, no nation is powerful enough to guide the global economy towards prosperity and balance».

This is the summary of The Leaderless Economy: Why the World Economic System Fell Apart and How to Fix It (Published on Jan 15, 2013)

More reviews in the Financial Times

• The New Digital Age, by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
• ‘The Alchemists’, by Neil Irwin
• Capturing the Light, by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport
• Europe, by Brendan Simms
• Capturing the Light, by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport