The economic seasons of the earthlings. Journal of boom and bust, 2003-2010

The book is a recollection – in the form of a gazetteer’s journal – of texts that account for some of the events that marked most of the period during which the crisis “officially” noted as beginning with 2008 had germinated. The unity of the anthology lies in identifying and illustrating, in the chronology of the aforementioned interval, of the two great “seasons” that follow in the modern dynamics of the economic cycles: the boom and the bust. The economic discourse, both academic and pop, was to (re)take note of the invariance regarding this oscillatory state of the world economy, despite the absence of consensus on the profound causes and appropriate remedies (free market or statist).

A special mark of this period is that it overlapped a process of “acculturation” of Romanian society with the institutions, policies and behaviours specific to the European Union membership, an economic space that was not free from endemic problems, revealed and accentuated by the recurrent boom-bust movement of the world economy. The economic upsurge induced by the US economy spilled over the European economies, asymmetric in evolutions, converging into a severe global recession. The book looks at the twists and turns of the recent global economic transformations, from the perspective of a university professor and economic journalist who wrote in real time about what was happening in and around Romania of those years.