Money for Nothing: Real Wealth, Financial Fantasies and the Economy of the Future

The world is at a critical juncture, poisted delicately between a surge in wealth and a descent into outright recession. In The Death of Inflation, Roger Bootle rocked the economic establishment with his predictions and was proven right. Now, he embraces controversy again with a fascinating and far-reaching book that analyses the prospects of deflation and depression and the great illusion of the economic bubble, which represents the difference between real and illusory wealth, or money for nothing. In Money for Nothing: Real Wealth, Financial Fantasies and the Economy of the Future, Bootle argues that if we can avoid the twin perils of protectionism and a deflationary slump, there is hope for a global leap in real wealth in the future through an acceleration of global trade. Bootle asserts that the old economic obsession with tangible things, such as land and machinery, has been replaced by a new economy of non things, such as intellectual property and knowledge. The result may be a change in our circumstances, making our lives today every bit as unreocgnizable to the next generation as the pre- and post-Industrial Revolution generations were to each other.