He is the author of numerous books, including The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization.
James applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Seven Crashes at the Yale University Press website.The war loans issued on the London Stock Exchange were a major exercise in propaganda, with crafted propaganda appeals. “The British sovereign will win”: a play on words, since the sovereign was a British coin, and also the monarch, and at the same time the sovereign people. […] Later, the practice attracted substantial criticism: had the bondholder been overpaid? The wartime prime minister, David Lloyd George, later admitted that the high yields on war bonds kept money dear “for all enterprises, industrial, commercial, and national.” The Scottish Independent Labour politician Tom Johnston, who in 1931 was briefly a cabinet minister and in the Second World War returned to office as secretary of state for Scotland, penned a coruscating indictment of the “financiers” in 1934. He quoted the exuberant headlines of the wartime financial press (“Money is at last coming into its own”) as an instance of the work of “the controllers of the Money Power, the men who cold-bloodedly raised their demands upon their fellow-countrymen with every German advance in the field and with every German U-boat campaign at sea; the men who organized the creation of hundreds of millions of unnecessary debt; the men who inflated rates of interest.”Page 99 doesn’t give the main argument of the book – obviously. The major theme of the book is the demonstration of how supply crises are moments when fundamental items such as food or fuel become scarce, prices rise, new channels of production and distribution are required, and the crisis spurs technical innovation. A central question for any political system becomes how to respond to the challenge of dramatic price movements. The price gyrations led to revolutions in government, as well as in business organization.
Page 99 is from the third chapter, concerning the third major shock of the book – the First World War – that represented a turning point in the history of globalization. This particular passage examines how the UK, which has been the center of the global financial architecture before the War, dealt with its shortages: through the expansion of borrowing, domestically and from foreigners, on increasingly expensive terms. A great deal of the book examines how governments respond to shortages, and how their response – in this case borrowing – sets up future conflicts. Here there is already anxiety about the financiers, who seem to be the principal beneficiaries of the shortages, while the soldiers on the front are dying. The social and political clashes over distribution created by wartime scarcity and wartime finance were even more apparent in Germany, where the postwar hyperinflation originated from wartime choices. Inflation, in the UK and in Germany, was the immediate response to a shortage, and one from which it was highly painful to escape.
The Page 99 Test: Making the European Monetary Union.
--Marshal Zeringue
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