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Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
written by Kevin Phillips
Studio : Viking Adult
by Viking Adult
Publisher : Viking Adult
Released : 2008-04-15
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780670019076
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 43 reviews)
List Price : $25.95
Our Price : $6.52
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Product Description |
The bestselling author reveals how the U.S. financial sector has hijacked our economy and put America’s 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 Phillips’s 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. America’s current challenges (and failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world economic powers—especially 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 megafinance—the 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 world’s 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 Phillips’s last book, whose dire warnings are now proving frighteningly accurate. |
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Help wanted |
Does the mortgage credit crisis bother you? Are you concerned about high oil prices? Do you get the feeling that Wall Street is largely a high-stakes casino, where insiders collect billions on winning bets, and also collect billions on losing bets, payed off with taxpayer bailouts? Do you want to understand why this is happening and how the game works? Then go find a different book. The author of this book is a "big idea guy", and he does nothing to elucidate his major points, all of which I was painfully aware before reading page one.
The writing is in a churning stream of consciousness style, looping back over the same topics several times, in no particular sequence, as if hoping that some meaningful connections would appear just from the proximity of the paragraphs. Most annoying, is the habit of introducing an interesting topic, promising, "more on this in a later chapter", then repeating the introductory comments without pushing further when the later chapter arrives.
There is no way to deny that the problems outlined in the book are important and deserve attention. Most of the positive reviews here award 4 or 5 stars based on that alone. But not only are no solutions offered, the problems themselves are not broken down and explained in any meaningful way. The comparisons of recent American history to the declines of previous empires is interesting, but superficial. If the thesis is that an over-emphasis on financial services leads to decline, I want to know why. I believe it could be true, but I don't understand why. No help here.
I do know that when the government takes the downside out of risky behavior, by promising taxpayer bailouts for failed lenders, that it's a recipe for disastrously risky behavior. That's obvious. Why is it allowed to happen? Who can stop it? Somebody please give me the name of a book that can help. |
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People Hurt People |
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"Guns don't hurt people. People hurt people." It's the same in shadow finance. If you invest for yourself, or if you want to invest for yourself, but you don't trust a system that keeps the middle class investors in the dark, that over-extends its borrowing to crisis levels, that sells questionable contracts & mortgages not only to naive Americans but to unsuspecting foreign institutions (buyer beware), then you will find the root causes of our 2007 financial lock-up in BAD MONEY useful. Like Roger Lowenstein's books describing earlier lock-ups, Kevin Phillips' book outlines how people we trust repeatedly let us down. Notice that I use the phrase "lock-up" & not "sell-off". From the early 1990s to the present, Lieberman, Greenspan, Paulson, Gramm, etc., all have fought against transparency in the financial markets by turning the discussion towards the fear of more regulations. Buyer beware! |
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Powerful but Depressing |
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I read this book after hearing the author, Kevin Phillips, give a radio presentation to the Cambridge Forum. Phillips was familiar to me as a spokesman for conservative perspectives over a span of decades, a perspective that I never shared. Thus, I was a bit skeptical when I first heard his presentation on this topic. However, I was quickly impressed by his careful, scholarly analysis, and have come to agree that he is exactly right. Phillips' central point is that the United States has abrogated its leadership position in the world by virtue of having stopped being a nation that produces goods and services of real value and becoming a nation who's primary business is the manipulation of financial markets and debt. He cites earlier examples of the Maritime Dutch republic of the 1700s, Great Britain around the time of WWI, and even Rome. The sobering point is that once a nation has gone this route, the course is irretrievable. He finds lots of blame for this situation, and it is not all deposited on any single political party...there is plenty to go around! He discusses our biggest product, Credit Debt, the root causes of the rise in oil prices, and the impact of right-wing evangelicals on the administration's feeble approach to dealing with our major challenges. This is not a feel-good book, but it is an important contribution to helping Americans understand our current situation. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED |
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Tough read but worth checking out |
Since there are so many long reviews of this book that pretty much cover most of the salient points, I'll keep mine fairly short. This book is interesting if you are one of those people that suspect there is something wrong with the way our country has been doing things, and there are a number of important ideas you may not have heard about or thought about in the way they are presented. I have only a couple of small complaints. As others have pointed out, the style is often extremely dense, especially when dealing with economic issues, and sometimes he seems repetitive. A layperson will feel like he or she pretty much has to trust the author because he uses so much jargon and brings in so many complex examples that there is no way a non-expert can evaluate his arguments. The book is mostly a rehashing and updating of his earlier book American Theocracy which might make more interesting and easier reading. The book is quite recent, yet it seems quite out of date because it pretty much assumes Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee in 2008 and barely even mentions the actual nominee in an aside. Finally, as others point out, the author doesn't really give any hints of where he thinks it will all lead or what we should do about the problems we face. Part of this is by design and he gives an explanation of why he doesn't do it, but in my opinion, this leaves the book open to many interpretations, and it is easy to jump to severe conclusions. On the positive side, the author does briefly point out, without dwelling on it, that the US does enjoy some potential advantages in geography that previous empires did not, and he also mentions that many of those previous empires now enjoy a relatively successful existence as a non-empire.
This book is relatively short so it's woth checking it out if you are interested in the topic. You might want to read his book American Theocracy first. |
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A tough read but a timely and truly urgent one |
Kevin Phillips' latest book - Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism - is not an easy read and not an easy book to review. To properly review it would take more space than is practical in this format. What I truly want to do with this review, then, is to convince people how very important this book is and, as other reviewers have noted, how important it is for anyone willing to tackle its complex subject matter to read it _now_. It will truly change your perception of what is happening in the US economy and in the US political scene. And, also as other reviewers have noted, it is in the end quite depressing as to how bad our current situation and how bad our prospects for the immediate future are.
Reading Phillips' books, I often get the feeling that I have walked
into a classroom where the professor is delivering his third lecture on
the subject and I must scramble to follow what he is saying. Bad Money is
no exception. I wish his editor(s) had pushed him to put in a few well
laid out examples that would endable the reader to properly understand
just what a CDO or an SIV actually consist of, how they function, how
they're handled in the marketplace and so on. Again, this is not an
easy read.
That said, however, the points Phillips makes are well backed up in
economic analysis and facts, and in historical relevance, both of which
areas Phillips is intimately familiar with. He is sounding an alarm to
anyone willing to listen, and what he lays out in this book is very
disturbing to anyone who has noticed the growing chaos in our financial
markets, the rising insecurity of our economic situation, and the
seeming inability and unwillingness of our political leadership to deal
with these growing problems.
The preface, with its subtitle "The Political Economics of Deception",
starts with these paragraphs that lay out in startling clarity the
central concern of the book:
"The most worrisome thing about the vulnerability of the U.S economy
circa 2008 is the extent of official understatement and misstatement --
the preference for minimizing how many problems there are and how
interconnected they are... Whether the U.S. government and the
Republican and Democratic parties can remedy the debt and oil-related
transformations of the last two or three decades is dubious enough. Far
more worrisome is the possibility that neither Washington nor Wall
Street is willing to confront the deeper problem -- the ascendancy of
finance in national policymaking (as well as in the gross domestic
product), and the complicity of politicians who really don't want to
talk about it."
One important point Phillips makes is one people can instinctively
relate to: the debasement of government statistics. People know from
their daily lives that the economy is not good, that prices of almost
everything are on the rise, that jobs are harder to come by, and that
overall, things just aren't as good as they once were. But at the same
time, the government keeps insisting that unemployment and inflation
are low and that the economy is growing, citing figures that people
can't reconcile with what they're experiencing every day. The reason is
because the numbers have been cooked to support the government's claims
and no longer represent any meaningful measure of the things they are
supposed to relate to. And the numbers they can't cook, they suppress.
For example:
"Beginning in March 2006, the new Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, ordered
that the government cease publishing data on changes in the broadest
measurement of the U.S. money supply, the so-called M3. It was
expanding at a 10-12 percent annual rate in 2006; outsiders calculated
that as of August 2007, that growth had accelerated to a high-powered
14 percent.... Continued publication of M3 reports would have undercut
the assertion of Bernanke... that the inflationary expectations of the
public had been safely 'anchored' at a low level by the tame core
CPI... For 2007, the U.S. M3 numbers show runaway inflation in the
annual range of 14 percent."
Another point Phillips makes in the book is that our growing financial
problems are compounded by our energy and political problems:
"the prior eminence of the United states in global petroleum matters
has left not only an outdated infrasturcture but a spectrum of
disabilities, unwarranted smugness, vested interests, and booby traps.
These range from currency vulnerabilities and lack of a serious
national energy strategy to apparent policy inertia in Washgton, where
many officeholders seem unable to understand how much has changed for
the United States over the last decade."
Other warnings include the rise of oil consumption by countries like
China and India and the extent to which oil-producing countries are
already re-directing their output towards those markets.
"In the wake of the unpopular U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Saudis showed
their displeasure... continuing to reduce oil sales to the United
States... after peaking at the equivalent of 1.7 million barrels per
day in 2002, Saudi sales to the United States fell to 1.1 million
barrels per day in May 2004... China soon jumped ahead of the United
States in oil exports from the Saudi kingdom... the demand for oil in
China alone will, before long, equal the entire production of Saudi
Arabia... China stands to be the world's largest oil market of the
2030's, possibly replacing the United States in that capacity by 2025."
Phillips also touches on why the political leadership seems both unable
and unwilling to deal with the array of problems the country is facing
and shows how this same deadly political inertia has afflicted other
great powers in history, citing examples from the Spanish, Dutch and
British economic empires that preceded our American economic empire.
The comparisons are fascinating and disturbing at the same time.
Again, in looking at what I have written, I know that I have barely
scratched the surface of all there is in this book that merits being
read. All I can do is urge anyone who wants to understand why the
economy seems to be in such bad shape, why the government figures seem
to be so contradictory with what is happening, and why our political
leaders seem neither willing nor able to deal with the problems, this
is the best book you can possibly read and the time to read it is
_now_, before the election, so you can see through the utterly
meaningless drivel that politicians are putting out instead of talking about the very real problems we're facing, about what our options - however painful - are, and about what the consequences to us as as nation are if we continue to do nothing.
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