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Like me, perhaps you have this feeling that somehow none of the experts have quite managed to explain what caused the credit crunch.   

Or why we apparently had to spend £billions bailing out rich bankers.  Or why governments think they can borrow their way back to prosperity.  Like the Queen, maybe you want to know why so few economists saw any of it coming.

Sensing my lack of understanding, my colleague, the excellent Steve Baker MP, gave me a copy of Peter Schiff's "How an economy grows and why it crashes" - on condition I read it over the summer.

I'm only on page 21, and already there's this gem:  "The economy didn't grow because they consumed more.  They consumed more because the economy grew."

That alone seems to stand on it's head the sort of assumptions about demand and consumption found in almost every episode of Newsnight and Today, or edition of the FT.

Indeed, continues Schiff, "Most economists think that demand can be increased by giving people more money to spend.  But that doesn't change real demand, just how much people can spend on items that have been produced.  Only by increasing supply can people actually get more of what they demand".

If true, successive economic policy-makers in the West have been getting it wrong, wrong, wrong for a generation or more.  And all those $ billion remedies to fix the credit crunch will only alleviate things temporarily.    

I hope Peter Schiff's book is being read by our Treasury team this summer.  If even I can understand the folksy language, they should be able to manage it, too.  Come the end of the year, they might have to.