The geographies of austerity

From boom to bust As late as mid-2007, to most observers, the global economic scene looked rosy. It seemed as though the laws of economics had changed: the advanced economies had rid themselves of inflation, the busi-ness cycle had been expunged and stable growth firmly established. Such was the conviction that a new economic era had arrived that in 2003 the Governor of the Bank of England described the previous decade as being NICE—a period of ‘non-inflationary consistent expansion ’ (King, 2003). And in March 2007, Gordon Brown, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer confidently an-nounced that ‘‘my report to the country is of rising employment and rising investment, continuing lo