Tackling Populism: the 89ers and the battle for the future

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 caught economists by surprise – but not historians, writes Michael Cottakis. As many rushed to convey throughout the 2000s, the excessive risk-taking by banks in key sectors bore worrying resemblance to trends exhibited in the build-up to the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The information was available for those willing to listen. Yet bankers and chief economists chose to ignore any warnings and plough blindly on. A similar trip down memory lane would have been useful to policy-makers, in order to avert the far more serious political crisis that followed. Europe’s ‘89ers’ cannot make the same mistake: they must look to the past in order to understand, and ultimately address, today’s populist flare-up.