Prasad 将这种宏观再平衡连结到制度与政治失灵：菁英攫取自由市场、民主与全球化的收益，而大量选民群体感到被排除，因而在疲弱的经济表现、两极化公共意见与战略竞争之间形成回馈。他以 US-China 关系为核心，指出双方更内向且高度民族主义，在气候与公共卫生上的合作减少，US 退出多边协议，而 China 平行建立制度；基于他在 early 2000s 于 IMF 中国团队的经验，他肯定国家主导体系具备危机动员能力，但也认为 China 在疫后放缓、劳动力萎缩、银行低效率与房地产压力，显示出该模式的限制。
这本书的含义并非要以其他体系取代市场，而是指出纯市场与纯指令两种极端都会造成不稳定，除非有分配底线保护被落下的人；Prasad 明确提出一个兼顾效率与稳定的中间路径问题。他认为 G20（在 Asian financial crisis 后成立，并在 2008-era 全球金融危机中具影响力）可能成为稳定器，并呼吁改革 IMF 与 World Bank 的治理，使新兴经济体获得更多投票权重，且较小借款方不应比大型借款方受到更严苛对待；他在 late 2022 以技术乐观启动此专案，之后因技术似乎放大失序而逆转，结论是走出此循环虽有可能，但更可能是漫长、艰难、非线性的过程，而非近期政策即可修复。
Eswar Prasad’s The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder, published on 2026-02-03, argues that globalization and populism now reinforce each other in a destructive cycle, and he says events after the 2024 US presidential election made his late-2024 draft look not too pessimistic but insufficiently dark. His core setup is a structural power shift in which the global economic center of gravity is moving from West to East, reflected in PPP-based IMF comparisons showing a declining G7 share of global GDP and a rising combined share for India and China, with geopolitics increasingly turning trade and interdependence from cooperation channels into conflict channels.
Prasad links this macro rebalancing to institutional and political breakdown: elites capture gains from free markets, democracy, and globalization, while large voter blocs feel excluded, creating feedback between weak economic delivery, polarized public opinion, and strategic rivalry. He centers US-China dynamics, noting greater insularity and hypernationalism on both sides, reduced cooperation on climate and public health, US pullback from multilateral agreements, and China’s parallel institution-building; drawing on his IMF China-team experience from the early 2000s, he credits state-led systems with crisis mobilization capacity but argues China’s post-pandemic slowdown, shrinking labor force, banking inefficiency, and property stress reveal model limits.
The book’s implication is not that markets should be replaced, but that pure-market and pure-command extremes both create instability unless distributional floors protect those left behind, with Prasad explicitly proposing a middle-path question for efficiency and stability. He identifies the G20, created after the Asian financial crisis and influential in the 2008-era global financial crisis, as a potential stabilizer, and calls for IMF and World Bank governance changes so emerging economies gain more voting weight and smaller borrowers are not treated more harshly than larger ones; he began the project in late 2022 with technological optimism, then reversed as technology appeared to amplify disorder, concluding that exiting the loop is possible but likely a long, difficult, non-linear process rather than a near-term policy fix.