There are many good things about this book. The first, obviously, is the author’s splendid name. You might think it was made up, like Holly Golightly, but no, he is a real person, and chief economist of ExxonMobil, a company not known for its fun and games. The second positive quality is that it features the UK, prominently. Many official statistics and analysts’ reports are now based on the relative performance of the United States, the European Union, China and Japan. Since Brexit, the UK can often be found under ‘other’, lumped in with Argentina or Australia. 

Goodspeed, although now based in Texas, has worked at universities in Oxford and London, and the core of his book is a long comparison of the economic performances of the United States and the UK. In particular, he focuses on both countries’ experience of recession and recovery over the last three hundred years, beginning with the southern states’ downturn of 1717–20, which he attributes to the blockade of Charleston by Edward Teach, otherwise known as Blackbeard. The transatlantic consequences were not trivial. US imports from England fell by 30 per cent, quite a blow to the home country. 

It is a commonplace today to say that downturns begin on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean. The global financial crisis of 2007–8 was a case in point. The problems in the US subprime mortgage market, quite unlike the housing finance system over here, led quickly to the demise