Boom Bust

This work identifies an 18-year property cycle, recurring with remarkable regularity and similarity over the last 200 years, in different countries under different political, economic and cultural conditions.

---

In his first book, "The Power in the Land" (1983), Fred Harrison forecast the recessions in the leading industrial economies in 1992. The prediction - published some nine years ahead of the events - confirmed the value of his historical analysis of trends in the industrial economy. Now, in "From Bust to Boom and Back", he returns with a more alarming prediction: whereas in the early 1990s there had been a number of major economies going into recession at about the same time, with the emergence of a global economy there is a very real danger of a global recession, based on a global business cycle, which would be all the more severe because there would be fewer countervailing forces. Harrison dismisses as bogus the talk of a "new economy", based on the nine years of uninterupted growth in the United States and the claims of Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer to have abolished the boom-bust. He argues that the seeds of the next bust are already well and truly sown, with 2010 being the fateful year for the next major crash. The US downturn in 2001 is evidence of the accuracy of his analysis.
While the gyrations of the stock market grab the attention, few see the underlying economic laws at work, inexorably moving towards the next collapse. Governments are hamstrung in their policy-making by a defective economic model which ignores the workings of the property market. From his study of several industrial nations over the last two hundred years, Harrison has identified an 18-year property cycle which has recurred with remarkable regularity and similarity in different parts of the world under different political, economic and cultural conditions. In "From Bust to Boom and Back" he reveals the factors at work and how they are intimately linked with the banking system which both fuels the boom and triggers the bust. He offers a way out based on the insights of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and other classical economists.