Since she quit newspaper reporting in the 1980s, Linda McQuaig has transformed herself into a most unlikely industry, writing a string of books about Canadian macroeconomic theory that have become popular hits. Her formula, in titles such as The Quick and the Dead and Shooting the Hippo, has been to turn policy issues such as free trade, globalization, monetary policy, and public debt into something like soap operas, in which the dominant forces of conservative economics are given faces and names and pitted against valiant, but ultimately unsuccessful, champions of left-wing nationalism.

This, her latest installment, is a highly readable and thoroughly researched broadside against the Liberal government for its response (or lack thereof) to pressures from international economic powers. Like several other writers, she has concluded that Canada has sacrificed its economic and political autonomy in order to placate global bond market investors and trade regimes: “To an alarming extent,” she writes, “the established voices in today’s society have convinced us that we are collectively powerless in the face of international financial markets.”

Unlike other writers, she builds a clear, convincing argument. She draws on a lively range of images to explain the ideas at work, and treats economic policy not as sets of theories in abstract conflict but as groups of individuals trying to find the best solutions, and in the process often being misled or ill-informed or foiled.

She has done her legwork, visiting the people involved and reconstructing their actual moments of conflict and discovery, and the result is an entertaining and often exciting story. Potentially eye-glazing topics such as the absurdity of “natural” unemployment rates and the promise of taxes on currency trades are rendered lucid and engaging. Whereas many popular accounts of economic history treat neoclassical orthodoxy as a sort of final dawning of truth, she provides a useful antidote that will help many people read daily headlines more skeptically.

This is a partisan book, of course, which means that it ignores potentially pertinent counter-arguments and is sometimes aimed not so much at her readers as at her arch enemies (columnist Andrew Coyne, Ottawa journalist Edward Greenspon, and Anthony Wilson-Smith, of The Globe and Mail editorial board). It will certainly drive these parties crazy, but it might also infuriate students of economics and history, who will find that some of her explanations are selective and lacking in nuance, particularly regarding the theories of John Maynard Keynes and his post-war legacy of global monetary policy. She would have us believe, for instance, that the Keynesian project failed only because it was never brought to full fruition, and that prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was caused by fixed exchange-rate policies – two notions that have largely been abandoned by both sides of the debate.

But this is not a book for economic specialists, and its main point – that neoliberal economic policies benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary citizens – is wonderfully argued and likely to find an enthusiastic audience. As with her last book, we can look forward to another noisy and very public debate.