Patrick Honohan, "Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

For readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, open economy, Patrick Honohan's book Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020)

This is, in part, because it covers complex issues yet is written for a non-specialist audience. But mostly it’s because, as Olivier Blanchard says, this is “financial crisis, seen from the driver’s seat". Honohan is not just an accomplished monetary economist with a lot to say but he was also, from 2009 to 2015, the governor of the Central Bank of Ireland and a member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank.

His book combines a monetary and financial history of Ireland since independence, theory and history around the formation of the Euro Area, an assessment of lessons learned from the crisis, and a behind-the-scenes memoir of how the crisis was fought.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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