Neither Doom Nor Loop
The title makes two promises and keeps neither. There is no doom here: Prasad is far too careful an economist to forecast anything so falsifiable. And there is no loop: no mechanism, no causal chain where disorder feeds on itself and compounds. A doom loop should be a specific, interesting claim about dynamics. I can tell you about what a doom loop looks like in a gaming industry, it’s my job to avoid one. What the book actually contains is a survey of things currently going wrong in the world economic order, arranged neatly and left unconnected.
The strange part is the mismatch between author and product. Prasad has real standing on trade and currency policy, and I expected a dry, focused book on trade policy with 1930’s parallels. Instead it reads like something a journalist would produce at the end of a posting: a mile wide and an inch deep, with nothing original and few independent stances held with conviction. From a reporter that shape is forgivable. Even the politics are hedged; the book is anti-Trump, but only in the safe economist register of tariffs raising prices and uncertainty deterring investment, positions that cost their holder nothing.
I stopped at 80%. I just couldn’t justify continuing: each marginal chapter was paying out so little insight there was no reason to believe the final fifth would break the pattern. Looking at review counts, it looks like the marketplace of ideas agreed with me.