Growing up in an African American working class family in the American Midwest, Jon Jeter watched the jobs supporting a community disappaear. As a journalist for the "Washington Post", he reported on the free market of the IMF and the World Bank, which in a single generation created a transnational class. Nations around the world have stopped making things and started buying them, imbibing a risky cocktail of deindustrialisation, privatisation and anti-inflationary monetary policy. In this powerful, accessible and eye-opening analysis of the global economy, Jeter gives the consequences of abstract economic policies a human faces and shows how the chickens are coming home to roost. From Rio de Janeiro to Shanghai to Soweto and Washington, DC, Jeter shows us how the economic prescriptions of 'the Washington Consensus' have only deepened poverty - while countries like Chile and Venezuela have flouted the conventional wisdom and prospered.

Author Biography

* Twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, JON JETER was the Washington Post bureau chief for southern Africa from 1999 to 2003 and the Post's bureau chief for South America from 2003 to 2004.