Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of Amercain Capitalism, by Kevin Phillips
Viking, 2008
209 pages plus Appendix, Notes and index
Description
In his last book, American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips warned us of the perilous interaction of debt, financial recklessness, and the spiking cost-and growing scarcity-of oil. Now, in his most provacative and timely book yet, he takes the full measure of this crisis, of which the housing bubble is but one aspect. In its hubris, the financial sector has hijacked the American economy and put our very global future at risk.
"Bad money" refers not just to the depreciated dollar but to the dangerous attitudes and flawed products of wayward megafinance. Over the last thirty years, financial services, including the ballooning debt and credit industry, have nearly doubled to a record 20 percent of the gross domestic product, while manufacturing has halved to 13 percent, greatly imperiling the economy.
Also "bad" are the risk miscalculations and strategic abuses of new multitrillion dollar producs and vehicles like CDOs and SIVs.
Phillips lashes out at the "bad money" practices and reckless behavior of buccaneering institutions like hedge funds and tabulates the dangers of hot-wiring US home ownership to global credit instability. He exposes the absurd but insisten faith in the efficiency of casino-like markets and WAshington's reliance on misleading statistics about inflation and consumer prices. Foreign policy has taken its toll as well. The dollar is losing value in the world because of America's financial irresponsibility and indebtness, and the ruinous war in Iraq has severely eroded our influence over global oil producers and foreign central banks.
As always, Phillips goes far beyond the daily news coverage of these topics, both to add historical context and to show the foolish web of dubious strategies in which they are entangled. America's current challenges and failures display striking parallels to the declines of previous leading wortld economic powers,especially the Netherlands and Britain. Global overreach, worn-out politics, excessive debt, and exhausted energy supplies are all chilling signals that America is declining as a world superpower.
Washington's promotion of public and private debt, its incompetence in energy matters, its blunders in Iraq, and the overall loss of international respect for American political leadership and global strategies are all fuel for Phillips' fire. He is devastating in his conclusion that, in all these ways, "bad" money and finance have failed the American people and pointed flawed US capitalism toward a global crisis.
Table of Contents
Preface: The Political Economics of Deception
1. Introduction: The Panic of August
2. Finance: The New Real Economy?
3. Bullnomics: Its Favoritisms and Fictions
Securitization: The Insecurity of it all
5. Peak Oil: A Potential pivot of the 2010s
6. The Politics of Evasion: Debt, Finance and Oil
7. The Global Crisis of American CApitalism
Appendix: Global Public Opinion and the Loss of Respect for the United States, 2003-2007
Notes
Index
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In the interests of Order and Method: My Schedule of Regular Posts
*Monday through Friday morning - schedules of President, VP and Secretary of State and her diplomats
*Monday through Friday afternoon - List of topics Limbaugh discussed on his program that day
*Monday through Friday througout the day - My posts on anything that I feel like talking about. At least one or two a day, sometimes more.
*Saturday through Sunday morning - An addition to my booklist of political books - covering Democrats, Republicans and other interested parties.
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