While mainstream financial analysts are stringing together ad hoc explanations for the financial crisis of 2008, a relatively small group of economists saw this coming. In The Cost of Capitalism, Robert J. Barbera explains why.

Barbera makes the case that investors and policy-makers can reduce the risk of truly gruesome outcomes if they better plan for the violent economic storms, which history confirms are always over the horizon.

Investors will learn how to gird themselves for the roller-coaster ride that is free market capitalism; policy makers will find out how to plan for crises they know will occur at some point; and academic economists will rethink their pursuit of ever more elaborate mathematical models that bear no resemblance to the real world.

The message is simple: Stop pretending that people are always rational and that markets are always efficient-and be prepared for market mayhem.

Robert J. Barbera, Ph.D., is executive vice president and chief economist at ITG and an Economics Department Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a noted Wall Street economist for over 25 years. Before arriving on Wall Street, Barbera was a staff economist for Senator Paul Tsongas and an economist for the Congressional Budget Office.