The title of global strategist Viktor Shvets’ book, The Twilight Before the Storm, aptly describes our current situation. On the one hand, Western societies are in the twilight of the long era of neoliberalism, dating back to the 1970s and characterised by financial deregulation, privatisation and faith in markets.

On the other hand, far from finding a new way forward, we are faced with multiple threats of social and economic collapse. The interaction of economic disruption, climate disaster, pandemics, and the breakdown of the old geopolitical order has been aptly described as a “polycrisis”. Influential economist Charles Goodhart recently warned, “the next 30 to 40 years are going to be very difficult.”

Review: The Twilight Before the Storm: From the Fractured 1930s to Today’s Crisis Culture by Viktor Shvets

I approached the book with excitement. It opens well, setting the scene with a discussion of the New York World’s Fair of 1939. The optimistic vision of the future that characterised the fair belied the gathering clouds of war. As a metaphor for our current situation, it is compelling. The seemingly endless economic prosperity of the 1990s and early 2000s is a distant memory. Wars and rumours of war abound.

But how did we get from 1939 to the current crisis? The question of why the economies of the developed world performed so well in the decades from 1945 to the early 1970s, and so poorly thereafter, is one of the most important – and under-researched – issues of modern history.

Shvets’ employment record includes stints at Citibank, Baring Securities, Deutsche Bank, DLJ and Lehman Brothers. He should have been in an ideal position to view both the successes and disasters of the economic system commonly known as neoliberalism.

Sadly, the book does not deliver what I was hoping for in this respect. The institutions listed above get at most a........

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