Economic cataclysms such as the Great Depression or today's ongoing collapse of global finance destroy commonly held understandings of political and economic reality. That is one reason why we call them cataclysms; such events occur precisely because no one with the power to do anything about them saw them coming. Icebergs spotted in time do not, after all, sink ships. But once the conventional wisdom has joined prosperity and confidence in the wreckage on the ocean floor of the global economy, we begin to hear of 'the' explanations for what happened. Such proclamations mark the times as surely as collapsed Ponzi schemes, falling governments, ruined banks and suicides among the former nouveaux riches. Thus, in the aftermath of the Depression, there emanated from various quarters announcements that the reasons for the catastrophe lay in policy errors by the Federal Reserve, in the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Acts, in stock trading on the margin, in vengeful treatment of Germany in the Versailles Treaty and so forth.

Similarly, the present-day plunge into the economic abyss has again brought forth a smorgasbord of assertions about 'the' cause: mad scientists let loose in dealing rooms, squishy liberals dishing out mortgages to the coloured, inscrutable Chinese officials 'manipulating' their yuan, feckless American central bankers throwing the gasoline of low interest rates on a briskly burning fire of asset inflation, Robert Rubin and his cronies in the Clinton White House tearing up regulations, George W. Bush waging wars of choice while cutting taxes on the rich—the discriminating diner can pick and choose what best suits his or her ideological tastes and preconceptions.

In The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis, Graham Turner has placed on the buffet table his own explanation for what has gone wrong, and it is a good deal more appetizing than many. Turner lays the blame for the current crisis squarely at the feet of the holy of holies of conventional economic orthodoxy: the 'unquenchable enthusiasm for raw free trade.' Given the near-total absence of any warning of the crisis from right-thinking academic economists, the distaste of the latter for such an account should provide no grounds for rejecting Turner's offering out of hand.