Book Reviews

In The End of Alchemy former Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King examines the role of money and banking in the 2007–2008 financial crisis and asks the question, “How did this happen?” (p. 1). He analyzes the forces that resulted in the financial crisis and asks whether it was a failure of individuals, institutions, or ideas. King argues that most accounts of the financial crisis focus on the “symptoms of the crisis,” such as the rise and fall of housing markets or bad lending decisions by banks, rather than on the “underlying causes of the events that overwhelmed the economies of the industrialised world in 2008” (p. 26). He further argues that we will be unable to understand what happened or prevent a repetition unless we focus on the underlying causes rather than the symptoms. Although he does not directly address the role of accounting, his discussion of...