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Cities have been missing from analyses of the crisis and debates about how to generate a sustainable recovery. Illuminating recent trends and emerging risks, Cities and Crisis is about the future, starting where we are. A fresh assessment is needed of what has changed since 1990 and what has not, of policy assumptions about urban economies, of the lessons of experience. Cities and Crisis looks at the strengths and weaknesses of macro-economic and sectoral policies to guide urban development in both declining and growing cities and regions. Without higher levels of urban innovation and infrastructure investment, growth will remain below potential. Stronger urban economies is not our only challenge.We can expect more frequent and more costly environmental, health, and even economic crises. Cities and Crisis frames a discussion of the vulnerability of cities, resilience, and the limits of domestic regulation to cope with mega-disasters and cross-border risks. The urban transformation which covers what must change in cities, to reduce the infrastructure deficit, improve productivity, and cope with emerging and known risks, must accelerate from the historical trend of 1-2% to 3-4% per year. This is unlikely to happen as long as governments seem unable to set out a vision of the future of cities. The urban agenda, including security and cross-border risks, will have a major impact on nation-states in the 21^st century. The level of uncertainty must be reduced if people are to have confidence to invest for the future. The West has always resolved once-in-a-century crises with a paradigm shift that speaks to our collective fears and hopes. Drawing on dozens of OECD reports on economic, environmental and governance, Cities and Crisis provides a “long-term, big-time” framework to put cities at the centre of policy.

On September 12th 2008, Lehman Brothers was valued at 639 billion US dollars. On Monday 15th September, it was worth nothing. How could trillions of dollars seemingly melt into air? Lehman Brothers had a long and prestigious history, and certainly until the end of 2007 had appeared to be conducting a very successful business. Its collapse was the largest bankruptcy in American history and is widely regarded as a crucial event in triggering the turmoil in the markets that triggered the global financial crisis. In this book, Oonagh McDonald, the author of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, unravels the events of that fateful September weekend. Using extensive documentary evidence and interviews with former Lehman employees, she reveals the decisions that led to Lehman's collapse, looks at why the government refused a bail-out and whether the implications of this refusal were fully understood. In clear and accessible language she demonstrates both the short and long term effects of Lehman's collapse.This is a fascinating story, with very wide implications. In particular, it raises vital questions about virtual capital and artificial value. McDonald uses her study of the Lehman collapse to examine what is meant by economic value and how it should be identified and measured.

No struggle for social justice that lacks a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society, and by whom, is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo. Much work has been done over the years by academics and activists to illuminate the broad processes of wealth extraction. But a constantly watchful eye is essential if new forms of financial extraction are to be blocked, short-circuited, deflected or unsettled. So when the World Bank and other well-known enablers of wealth extraction start to organise to promote greater private-sector involvement in ‘infrastructure’, for example through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), alarm bells should start to ring. How are roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways being eyed up by finance? What bevels and polishes the lens through which they are viewed? How is infrastructure being transformed into an ‘asset class’ that will yield the returns now demanded by investors? Why now? What does the reconfiguration of infrastructure tell us about the vulnerabilities of capital? The challenge is not only to understand the mechanisms through which infrastructure is being reconfigured to extract wealth: equally important is to think through how activists might best respond. What oppositional strategies genuinely unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?

The last quarter of the twentieth-century brought forth enormous change to the lives of working-class Britons. This transformation came mainly in the form of widespread industrial closure and the impoverishment associated with permanent unemployment. No British city bore closer witness to this phenomenon than Liverpool. The despair of joblessness and economic deprivation blighted Merseyside to a significantly greater extent than any other major British conurbation. Liverpool had frequently been prone to industrial unrest since 1945, but it was the dawn of Thatcher and the rise of neoliberal economics which made this city a nucleus of resistance against the encroaching tide of monetarism and sweeping de-industrialisation. This critique explores six case studies which illustrate how elements of a highly mobilized and politicized working-class fought against the rapid rise in forced redundancies and increasing industrial closures. Some of their responses included strikes, factory occupations, organising and politicizing the unemployed, effecting radical left-wing municipal politics, and sadly, even surrendering to violent civil unrest. This critique concludes that in the range, intensity and use of innovative tactics deployed during these conflicts, Liverpool stood out from every other British city. Liverpool was distinctive mainly because of its own unique history which involved a long, tortured, familiarity with poverty and mass unemployment.

Outsourcing-contracting out the delivery of public services to private providers-is a political revolution in the way the economy is governed. This book combines follow the money research and political analysis to critique outsourcing and constructively propose a “fee for management” alternative. Government presses outsourcing partly because it benefits when outsourcing delivers new possibilities of blame shifting. Cost reductions in the outsourced service are too often levered on wage reductions in the outsourced service which are futile when they increase the social bill for subvention of low wages. The result is a kind of sham capitalism which allows the private sector to take profit unjustifiably on mundane contracts without investment or revenue risk. At corporate level, the result is fiasco prone conglomerates and extensive arbitraging of limited liability in ways which disadvantage the citizen