He's still on the first bit so far, but basically he seems to reckon Keynes is where it's at. There's a good review
here.
From there:
Quote:
As for what happens now, Cable says the reform camp has three distinct strands. There are the "New Interventionists" who see the disaster as evidence of supine, even non-existent, regulation and want to replace the Washington consensus – liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation – with something akin to the mixed economy of the 50s and 60s. Then there are the "Old Liberals", who say that some improvement in regulation is needed but that, on balance, the good markets outweigh the bad. Cable puts himself somewhere in the middle: he believes that financial markets are subject to repeated bubbles, panics and crashes, but maintains that there are benefits from markets in goods and services, and from trade. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, in other words.
The final chapter of The Storm fleshes out what a Liberal Democrat reform package would look like. Banks would have to hold more capital in the good times, thus limiting the amount they can lend. Cable would also like the Bank of England to "lean against the wind" when setting interest rates. Most controversially of all, he says Britain's banking sector should be split in two: there would be highly regulated high street banks and riskier investment banks, hedge funds and shadow banks that had no state guarantee. Cable clearly regrets that wheelerdealers such as Adam Applegarth at Northern Rock and Sir Fred Goodwin at Royal Bank of Scotland were ever allowed to turn these pillars of respectability into debt factories, and he wants banks to return to being safe but boring.
Liberal and Democrat here aren't in the American sense, by the by. Not sure how interested you really are.
Used to like his books.
