How Do We Fix This Mess? The Economic Price of Having it all, and the Route to Lasting Prosperity

Robert Peston is ITV's political editor, presenter of the politics show Peston on Sunday and founder of the education charity, Speakers for Schools (speakers4schools.org). He has written four books, How Do We Fix This Mess?, Who Runs Britain?, Brown's Britain and WTF?. For a decade until the end of 2015, he was at the BBC, as economics editor and business editor. Previously he was City editor at the Sunday Telegraph, political editor and financial editor at the FT, a columnist for the New Statesman, and at the Independent in various roles. Peston has won more than 30 awards for his journalism, including Journalist of the Year from the Royal Television Society. His blog is itv.com/robertpeston, on Facebook he is facebook.com/pestonITV and he is @peston on Twitter.

Kishan Koria is the Editor of Peston on ITV where he also makes the channel's election debates. He's worked in television for seven years throughout which his colleagues have frequently suggested to him that British politics would soon calm down after a period of chaos! Prior to that he had a short stint as an Economics teacher for sixth form students. Bust? is the first book Kishan has co-written though he previously served as the researcher for Robert Peston's 2017 release, WTF?.

'Robert Peston's compelling account of global financial meltdown is a must-read.' Observer

What can we learn from the 2008 recession? ITV's political editor explains the global economic mess and how to escape it - in his characteristically straightforward way.

'How do we fix this mess? I don't know. But don't stop reading now. Perhaps if we have a clearer understanding of what went wrong, we'll have a better idea of what needs to be done. This book is a map of what needs to be fixed.'

The record-breaking unbroken growth between 1992 and 2008 wasn't the economic miracle that it seemed. It was based on a number of dangerous illusions - most notably that it didn't matter that the UK and US year after year consumed more than they earned.

But we couldn't go on increasing our indebtedness forever. The financial crash of 2007/8 and the subsequent economic slump in much of the west was the moment when we realised we had borrowed more than we could afford to repay.

So who got it wrong? Bankers, investors and regulators? And were they greedy, stupid or asleep? What was the role of government? And what part did we, as consumers, play in all this? How do we get through this difficult period of transition to a more sustainable economy, one based on investment and exports, rather than on borrowing and consumption?

With the same probing lucidity he brought to Who Runs Britain? and WTF?, Robert Peston takes us step-by-step towards a common sense way to fix this mess.