I’m going to give you a brief overview of the book that I read recently, called « How to survive (outlive) crises ». The author is Jacques Attali – an economist, writer and French civil servant.

In his book along anlysing series of crisis that might happen to humankind in the close future, he gives some recommendations concerning the behaviour and the views that we should acquire or develop in order to better adapt to the situation we find ourselves in times of crisis, either prosperous or difficult.
In his first 2 chapters he gives the analysis of the current situation of crisis, its reasons and its conséquences, he gives an overview of the situation in 2010, 2011 and predicts 2 possible scenarios according to which the crisis could evolve.
The first one is a U scenario (a U as a grafic), it’s an optimistic forecast meaning that the situation will gradually improve. The optimism that already exists on the stock exchange since april 2009 will lead to a progressive improvement of the real value of some compromised assets, the restoring of the banks’ equity capital, then an upturn of the commercial lending and of the private investment. Even if a U scenario takes pace, it will be a long prosess. The américain GDP would get back to its level only by 2011, the sectors mostly concerned by a downturn like autombile or housing would regain their level of turnover in 2007 only by 2015, and the full employment will not be achieved before the year 2017.
The second, a W scenario, is a pessimistic one, meaning that even after a factual recovery of stock exchange there could be a lasting plunge back of the world economy (which is a second V of a W scenario). He gives a number of reasons of that. For instance, the lack of demand. There is no way to boost consumption for the households tending to reduce their expenditure and there’s no way to encorage demand in credits of over – indebted population. The central banks can’t lower interest rates which are already low, the