Some projects take longer to tell than others. The one about the awarders of the Nobel economics prize started out in 2007 under contract to write a book about the history of a new method of describing conflicts of interest and, sometimes, resolving them: Game theory was is the air those days, thanks to Sylvia Nassar’s biography of John Nash, a troubled genius who became a Nobel laureate for having been one of its founders.
After the Panic of 2008, however, my project became a story about an important discovery that emerged: a precise account of how systemic panics unfold, perhaps worthy of a Nobel prize. In 2016, the unexpected award of Nobel prize for very different achievements, eliminated and blurred that possibility.
“The world doesn’t need another story about the crisis,” proclaimed the editor. As usual, he was right. Still interested in the story of 2008, however, I put online my version of the story as The Tardy Product – nineteen instalments, over four months. The draft brought another contract. I began a history of the first (and last) new Nobel prize, before and after its founding. W.W. Norton Co. forgave the advance on the game theory book. I was free to continue writing.
The new project would be a story about the prize awarders, not the laureates themselves. There were plenty of interruptions along the way the first term of President Donald Trump and Covid among them. After things settled down, I resumed, but by now I had a problem. I was running out of time.
Then the Nobel project story suddenly took an unexpected turn and I was hooked, but now time was really short. I had a good story I didn’t want to see it go unreported, if I were unable to get it into print. So I put it online as a serial story, one weekly installment after another. I knew that at least the Swedes would read it.
It was easier to write it out once a week, but harder for readers to follow a complicated story with twenty-five episodes. This wasn’t Flash Gordon on Saturday afternoons. Decades before, I had written a forty-part serial about technology and economic growth for The Boston Globe. Readers were baffled by that one, too, but it produced a contract to write Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.
I called the new serial The Spider in the Web, after the what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences – the prize awarder – understood of its task. I recapitulated the story once or twice as I went along, but that didn’t help readers much either. There was either. There was no table of contents, no index, no way to thumb forward and backward. An old friend wrote to say, “I’ll wait for the book.”
Now I am about to do the same thing again. Another fiscal crisis of potentially world-wide entanglement is approaching a boil. You can follow the story of it on the front pages of the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal especially those Zuckerman’s stories.
Zuckerman is the author of The Greatest Trade Ever, about John Paulson’s highly leveraged bet on subprime mortgage securities, and The Man Who Solved the Market, about mathematician Jim Simons and the epic history of his his Renaissance Technologies. Zuckerman has the crack WSJ economics team behind him as well.
The FT’s edge stems from the financial sophistication of its readers. It has been emphasizing problems with the $2 trillion private credit industry on its front page ever since two obscure American firms, First Brands and Tricolor Holdings, filed for bankruptcy protection almost a year ago. Robin Wigglesworth, author of Trillions, is its star.
The atmosphere in global credit markets is thundery. The squall in the private credit business may pass — for now. But if you want to understand how and why systemic crises develop and unfold, and what might be done to arrest them, it, read The Opacity Boys, starting next week erial here in Economic Principals. No index, but a table of contents, seven installments, close to the news.