In 2016, on the eve of Donald Trump’s victory, the BBC released a provocative documentary from British filmmaker Adam Curtis. Like all of Curtis’s movies, the film is kaleidoscopic in its presentation and sprawling in its scope, but it centers around a relatively simple thesis. Over the past forty years, our leaders have abandoned mass politics for a consumerism whose convenience and seeming security have enabled them to preserve their grip on power. “Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world,” he declares toward the beginning of the documentary. “Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them. And no one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future.”

Curtis calls this experience (and the film that explores it) “hypernormalisation” — a term he borrows from the Russian science fiction authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who captured the alienation of late Soviet society in their novel Roadside Picnic (the novel later served as the inspiration for the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker). In her latest book, Goldman Sachs executive–cum–journalist Nomi Prins coins the titular phrase “permanent distortion,” which she uses to describe a related phenomenon: the growing cleavage between global financial markets and real-world economies.

While it acknowledges a range of bad actors ravaging working people, Permanent Distortion sets its sights on the US Federal Reserve and the practice known as quantitative easing. In the wake of the 2008 crash, Prins writes, the Fed poured trillions into banks with no strings attached, while millions of people sank into destitution and despair.