World Famous Comics: Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
By: Kevin Phillips Publisher: Viking Adult Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Viking Adult Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 256 Publication Date: April 15, 2008
Product Description: The bestselling author reveals how the U.S. financial sector has hijacked our economy and put Americas global future at risk
In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips warned us of the perilous interaction of debt, financial recklessness, and the increasing cost of scarce oil. The current housing and mortgage debacle is proof once more of Phillipss prescience, and only the first harbinger of a national crisis. In Bad Money, Phillips describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of American domination of world markets. Americas current challenges (and failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world economic powersespecially the Dutch and British. Global overreach, worn-out politics, excessive debt, and exhausted energy regimes are all chilling signals that the United States is crumbling as the world superpower.
Bad money refers to a new phenomenon in wayward megafinancethe emergence of a U.S. economy that is globally dependent and dominated by hubris-driven financial services. Also bad are the risk miscalculations and strategic abuses of new multitrillion-dollar products such as asset-backed securities and the lure of buccaneering vehicles like hedge funds. Finally, the U.S. dollar has been turned into bad money as it has weakened and become vulnerable to the worlds other currencies. In all these ways, bad finance has failed the American people and pointed U.S. capitalism toward a global crisis. Bad Money is the perfect follow- up to Phillipss last book, whose dire warnings are now proving frighteningly accurate.
Bad Money I found parts of this book to be very difficult to comprehend and enjoy, i.e. the details of the financial industry and their various methods/schemes. However, the chapters on Peak Oil and the Politics of Delusion were outstanding! In fact, I would recommend the purchase of the book for the Peak Oil chapter alone. Every American should read that chapter; especially those who think we're fighting a military war with the rest of the world. In fact, we're fighting an economic war with the rest of the world and we're losing it; partially because of the slow, steady drain that fighting a military war brings with it.
Makes you want to put your money in the mattress Mr. Phillips hardly needs another glowing review, but his analysis will make you want to pull your money out of whatever U.S.-based investment it is in now, and stick it in the mattress (Don't! Inflation will eat it up). What blows me away is that Mr. Phillips wrote the book I wanted to publish. In fact, the prospectus I wrote at the end of last year to interest my publisher in such a work eerily echoes almost all of the major themes hammered on in "Bad Money."
What Phillips does best is profusely illustrate and provide evidence for the complicity of the traditional Wall Street firms, the "shadow" banking system (private equity and hedge funds), and the US Government (Federal Reserve, Secretary of the Treasury, etc) in perpetuating the myth of U.S. economic well-being. What you are led to conclude is the economic crisis we are currently experiencing, not even close to bottoming out, is simply the five year delay of the collapse of the dot.com, telecom, and energy (e.g., Enron) sectors, caused by the same financial shenanigans perpetrated by the same financial engineers.
The only weakness I can see in the book is that Phillips only hints at who these people are and how they seem to move comfortably from one economic crisis to another. He provides a glancing history of how other world powers were felled by their infactuation with financial mercantilism, facilitated by migrant financial engineers. While he acknowledges that there's more here the reader needs to know about, it seemed painfully obvious to this reader that he felt this was a line in inquiry better left to others.
Thankfully, Phillips sets aside any poliitcal and economic ideology. He is unsparing in his critique of politicians from all sides of the spectrum and shows how this crisis has nothing to do with party affiliation and everything to do with the crony-capitalism that has reduced free-market economics to a shadow of its former self.
Every American with an inquiry mind should read this book.
Jason Makansi, author of "Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means To You."
A Labor Perspective The fact that Joe "I'm-mortgaged-to-the-hilt" is now living in a car he can't afford to move may mean more than a temporary adjustment in the credit system. That's according to author Phillips, and his book makes good sense. As he shows, our financial underpinnings are rickety, to say the least. Worse, our financial bubble no longer rests on an industrial foundation, but has become the economic foundation itself.
Now talk of "foundations" has slipped out of fashion with the rise of post-modernism, and certainly Phillips does not himself use the term. Instead, he talks about an economy that lacks its former variety, and as a result has come to put too many eggs in the financial basket, as it were. Thus, when the various financial shocks including oil pricing reverberate, there are few other sectors to cushion the blows. Thus, the US may be on the way to losing leadership of the capitalist world to the fast rising industrial economies of Asia. This, I take, to be a major thesis of the book.
I want to suggest a slightly different perspective on the current financial shake-up than the book's more narrowly internal one. A moment ago I alluded to an economy of goods and services resting on an industrial base. The reason for suggesting such is that historically the concept of industry implies a working class in a way that the concept of a financial world does not. And, it's the relative absence of a labor component to the analysis that I believe detracts from the book's overall framing.
It's no secret that wages and benefits for American workers have been stagnant or in decline for some time. The trend has spread across administrations of both major parties. Moreover, the proportional share of wealth gained from productivity has also declined for wage-earning Americans. These I take to be uncontested facts that reflect the widening wealth disparities of the last 30 years or so. The agents and effects of this decline are more central, I believe, to the current crisis than a basically conservative commentator such as Phillips allows for.
At the most obvious level a better paid workforce would have less need for risky sub-prime and credit card gimmicks, other factors being equal. Indeed, homes and products were within the pay-check reach of most wage-earners for several decades in mid-century past. Unsurprisingly, real wages and proportional shares for blue-collar America also rose during that same period. Much of that prosperity came from rising shares in the nation's wealth distribution, while those shares were largely kept in place by the clout of organized labor at both the work site and in the nation's capital. In an important sense, I would argue, strong unions acted as a break on capital's natural tendency to over-reach and suffocate effective demand by pushing down wages.
However, a number of factors conspired to weaken organized labor, whose presence was never really accepted in the halls of power, anyway. The inflationary spiral of the 70's, the off-shoring of the Clinton-Bush years, along with the albatross of Taft-Hartley, all contibuted heavily to labor's decline. The point here is that people who could formerly shop at Safeway and May Co. were soon faced with a choice. With a shrinking wallet, they could either go to Walmart or take out a credit card, while for many, the situation meant doing both. In short, a fast receding American Dream not only jeopardized those working people reaching out for it, but also those who had already attained a measure. Put broadly, the relative loss of purchasing power among wage-earners opened up a fertile field for the credit exploitation and the financial speculation to come.
There's a second and much less noticed factor at work here. This one has more indirectly to do with what Phillips calls the crisis in American capitalism. And that is the sudden demise of Wall Street's great rival, the Soviet Union. Ironically, in my view at least, that so-called socialist system (really a state-capitalism) acted as a foreign brake on the Wall St.'s most aggressive and adventurous tendencies, such as the risky deregulation campaigns of the Clinton-Bush era, a direct precursor of the credit fiasco.
Now, whatever it's real life failings, the Soviet system did present an alternative to American style capitalism, and one whose worker-peasant appeal resonated among Third World nations. Thus the ideological competition was intense. At a policy level, Washington was forced to remain concerned with the general health of wage-earning America. After all, vast tracts of middle-class suburbia, along with abundant, affordable consumer goods amounted to an important component of America's overseas appeal. On the other hand, large numbers of people seen living in cars or getting kicked off welfare or retiring without pensions or getting sick without health insurance, would have cancelled much of that appeal. And image mattered to the rivalry.
Of course, a Soviet presence couldn't stop the Vietnam disaster, nor prevent industries from relocating along the Mexico border, nor halt partial deregulation under Reagan's aegis. Nonetheless, it's hard to conceive of even a Bush Jr. embarking on an Iraq adventure with a counter-force so close by, or de-industrializing the economy by taking manufacture out of the country, or ignoring pressure from a Soviet backed PLO to finally settle that 60-year running sore. In fact, the Soviet collapse, whatever its true benefits, disastrously freed Washington's most aggressive corporatists from their boardrooms and think tanks. Now, those strategists could reach for global empire without an over-concern with domestic repercussions. And it's those effects that are now being felt in a shrinking dollar, a debt crisis, and a Wall St.-led Democratic Party as committed to world hegemony as the Republicans.
The irony is that the very economics accentuated by the global power grab are not only undermining the grab itself, but threatening to undo the primacy of American capital. Phillips is right to be alarmed. But a labor perspective is much more important to the picture than Phillips provides.
Bad Money, Great Writing, Great Information If you love words and sentence construction then you will really appreciate Mr. Phillips' writing style. It's a pleasure to read popular nonfiction written above the ususal boring high school level. Yes, his style takes active reading at first, but then your brain becomes used to it and savors each passage as a refreshingly delightful and active experience.
I am SO glad to have read this book. I feel much better prepared for the future.
Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism The book is excellent, the research appears unbiased and objective, and the delivery of the information is direct without being dogmatic. The mainstream media should be so honest about the mess we're in!
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