In his 2007 Budget Statement, months before the first signs of the coming crash appeared on the horizon, Brown solemnly declared (not for the first time): ‘We will not return to the old boom and bust.’ How could Brown–and so many others–have got it so horribly wrong? The key to this catastrophic misjudgement lies in their losing sight of one crucial factor: the distinction between ‘price’ and ‘value’, which over the previous decades had been lost from sight.
