Robert Lucas Jr.

The US economy continued to grow, and those of its closest allies grew alongside it.

By 2006, such was the confidence in a specifically US-centred economic order that won economics Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas notoriously could be found opining that the, quote, fundamental problem of macroeconomics has been solved.

And then a year later, the massive investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed, and 12 months after that, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the great financial crisis began.

And yet, as Adam Too stresses in Crashed, his essential near-history of this period and its aftermath, the US recovered.

And the Uzbeks, for example, seem to be, uh, seem to be approaching this with a certain religious zeal.

Um, I remember when I was a, uh, when I was a young student at, uh, the University of Chicago, my professor, Robert Lucas, uh, uh, posed this question, "Why do EM economies that offer such huge, uh, potential huge growth rates, um, still suffer from so little capital? Um, whereas developed economies which offer a very little return seem to have a, a surplus of it." And certainly the...

And the answer, of course, was that, um, political economic frameworks were very poor, um, in EMs.

And so, um, that risk premium, um, uh, dissuaded capital from going there.