Paul Krugman’s dazzling and prescient polemic The Return of Depression Economics surveyed the economic crises that had swept across Asia, Russia and Latin America in the 1990s, and showed that those crises were a warning for all of us. Now depression economics has returned: when the great housing bubble of the mid-2000s burst, the Western financial system proved as vulnerable as those of developing countries caught up in earlier crises – and now a replay of the 1930s seems all too possible.