The story covers the period from 2029 to 2047, and the focus is on financial turmoil through the eyes of the family, rather than just technological or socio-political changes. The trouble is, with large, complex systems that may be growing inherently unstable, they can still perk along for quite some time, until some little thing trips the catastrophe.” Dreams of a Future Gone By Drawing on modern parallels of US over-indebtedness that she projects out into various scenarios, Shriver envisions a US so indebted that default becomes inevitable, and the president has to repudiate the debt. Her story follows the Mandibles, a family who enters the novel relatively wealthy, only to see government action destroy the dollar and initiate a period of rapid inflation. We - as the British are quite fond of saying - kicked the can down the road.” “My worry was that we didn’t actually escape it, but simply delayed it.

“My impression, once the dust had settled on that one, was that we had brushed up against a kind of international collapse that we ultimate escaped,” she said. Shriver was especially interested in the events of 2008 and the financial collapse that occurred, which directly led her to writing The Mandibles. This and other details of her novel are lifted from real-life events, and she was inspired by recent troubles both here and abroad that informed her story. Shriver’s novel takes the premise that the United States is embroiled in a bloodless financial war in 2029 that leads to a dollar collapse, the loss of reserve currency status, and its replacement by the Bancor, a new supranational currency backed by a basket of commodities. This time on Financial Sense, we speak with Lionel Shriver, author of a new gripping novel called The Mandibles, which speculates on what life might look like in the US in the decades to come. Sometimes, this exercise is meant to produce tangible investment advice, but other times, we’re interested in something deeper to better understand the large-scale forces operating at the national level. Those of us with a deep interest in economics and financial issues often try to peer into the future and speculate about what’s to come. Full audio podcast can be heard on the Newshour page here or on iTunes here. Interview with Lionel Shriver, author of The Mandibles on the Big Picture.

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver