I wrote the bulk of When the Money Runs Out in 2012. Four years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the event now regarded by many as the 'trigger' for the global financial crisis, I sensed that the policy debate was too narrowly focused on what was likely to prove the wrong issue. Specifically, while I had read and heard a great deal about the relative merits of stimulus versus austerity -ultimately a debate about the best way of delivering a return to economic 'normality' -it struck me

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... there was too little discussion about the possibility that 'normality' as previously understood was no longer within reach. I feared that we were on the verge of a permanent slowdown in economic growth, one that threatened severe political upheaval. Admittedly, I had my own biases. Having spent the early 1990s analysing the Japanese economy, I was perhaps more worried than most that economies could slow structurally. Many in the West had looked at Japan with an air of amused detachment, taking the view that its 'lost decades' were something that would never happen elsewhere. I thought this attitude was far too complacent. After all, the West had