Who's in Charge Here? (Penguin Shorts): How Governments are Failing the World Economy - Alan Beattie

This title from the Penguin Shorts series (and it is very short, only 76 pages) still manages to confuse and befuddle. While Beattie’s style is breezy and fresh, as opposed to the expected droll, newsreader tones, the challenge of sexing up the global economic crisis has beaten him.

However, this is unlikely to deter the kind of reader that would pick up a book with a mouthful of a title such as How Governments are Failing the World Economy, and for those readers, Beattie has presented one hell of a monetary mess in a more approachable form. No question is too stupid or obvious, with acronyms and government bodies such as the IMF and The Bank of England, properly explained, perhaps for the first time for some readers.

A journalist by trade, Beattie adopts an ‘everyman’ voice, which is helpful if you’re approaching this dull title with trepidation, as he welcomes you into his circus of lending, cover-ups, panics and crashes with a cheerful, accessible vocabulary.

Like The Etymologicon, this is a quick, beneficial read if you’re looking to arm yourself with impressive faux-economical knowledge and dinner-table conversation titbits. In short, this whole mess started due to a terrible American idea-subprime mortgages, then we panicked, then the rest of Europe panicked, then the Asian markets threatened to become all-powerful and all we could do was sit back and, in Beattie’s own words, "watch a gang of irascible, quarrelsome architects try to redesign a house in the middle of a raging fire."