Off Balance: the Travails of Institutions That Govern the Global Financial System

Award-winning journalist and author Paul Blustein has received wide acclaim for his books about the inner workings of international economic institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization. In Off Balance, he weaves a compelling narrative that details the failings of such institutions in the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008. Based on interviews with scores of policy makers and on thousands of pages of confidential documents to which Blustein obtained exclusive access, the book focusses mainly on the IMF and the Financial Stability Forum in the run-up to and early months of the crisis. Blustein exposes serious weaknesses in these and other institutions, which lead to sobering conclusions about the governability of the global economy.