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 | Kevin Phillips | A solid non-fiction account of oil troubles, debt, and the bursting of the American financial bubble

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Bad Money: Reckles...

	Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism Kevin Phillips Viking Adult, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 72 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Phillips Provides a Unique Perspective

I thought I did a good job of keeping up with the collision of international finance and politics, but reading Bad Money made me realize how little I know. This book has completely shifted my perspective on the world economy and the U.S. diminishing role in it. Since finishing the book, I read and hear world news stories almost daily that confirm Phillips' insightful analysis (like the way that China is using its vast reserves of U.S. dollars to buy world influence and control the distribution of other countries' oil, just as the U.S. once did).

The world has changed and, until reading this book, I never realized how much. I just heard the door slam on the predominant global influence of the U.S.

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A solid non-fiction account of oil troubles, debt, and the bursting of the American financial bubble

Kevin Phillips' BAD MONEY receives Scott Brick's excellent acting skills as it provides a solid non-fiction account of oil troubles, debt, and the bursting of the American financial bubble. Any collection strong in nonfiction economics listens needs BAD MONEY: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM.

It is worse than you think

Kevin Phillips, you have done it again. I don't know why you morphed from a Republican strategist into a harsh critic of right-wing, robber barons' assault on the welfare state and its dream of economic justice. But you hit the nail on the head time-and-time-again: entrenched interest groups, the collapse of real political debate, the transition from productive to financial capital, the politics of oil, the protection of Wall Street by the Fed. giving rise to meltdowns rather than tamable booms and preventable busts, the shift of wealth from those who labor or save to those who speculate, financial gambling in the form of derivatives and other synthetic securities which reward their inventors and defraud both latecomers and the public at large, the embrace of moral hazard which is a subsidy for those too big to fail and happen to be friends and peers of the government officials who are supposed to regulate them. I know someone who hustled subprime mortgages for speculators by knowing how to work the computer programs lenders use to assess mortgage risk; his clients had absolutely no equity. There was so much money to hustle, lenders were not interested in due diligence. They chopped the loans into little pieces, packaged them to disguise risk and sold them as equities. I am not sure the broker is not in jail. He was small potatoes. How about the Mertons, Greenspans, Bernankes and legions of Ph.D.s from MIT who claimed they were diversifying risk only to discover when things went wrong they were gambling on air and there was no liquidity? A fixed roulette wheel does not help when too many people learn how it is loaded. See Bookstaber's excellent A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation. As Phillips points out, a good deal of finance in the US is a giant subsidized Ponzi scheme. Only in a world of greed and class oppression would labor be taxed more than return on capital.
It is a pretty shabby picture but unfortunately 90% of the voting public has little ability or interest in understanding it. No wonder, as Phillips points out, Obama's backers will swallow his hedge fund contributors without noticing what their presence in his camp means. Although Joe Biden may bring a white bread image to the Democratic ticket, he also brings the bipartisanship which makes it impossible to honestly name, if not solve, both foreign policy problems and the increasingly skewed distribution of wealth in the US. If I were to talk to my middle/upper-middle class friends about how much we all benefit from the set up as it is, they would either not listen or regard me as attacking them.
Kevin, you have the courage to tell it like it is. But is anyone listening?
Besides the fact that the book is a bit repetitive and, having listened to it as a book on tape, the narrator is overly dramatic making each nugget of corruption sound like an apocalypse, I find some of the overarching historical comparisons a bit of a stretch. The declines of Rome, Spain, the Dutch Confederation, and finally Britain are interesting background, and some aspects are reminiscent of what is happening to
America now, but each had its own very individual causes. Metropolitan Spain, the master of a great empire, was always a debtor. That is how it fought its wars. New World silver and gold just made it possible to fight nastier wars of the counter reformation. Indebtedness was not some declining empire phenomena. Italian and German bankers were paying for the conquest of Granada years before Columbus sailed. Similarly depopulation and decline don't really fit either England or Spain. Spain had plenty of poor from denuded Andalusia to get rid of and opportunity lay abroad. Besides wool for the Low Lands, wine and olives, Spain had little industry and needed less when the geld started pouring in. And, at the height of the industrial revolution, England was exporting it street ruffians and poor to Australia. There was no place for them at home even though industry needed surplus labor to keep wages down. It had all the displaced, barefoot Irish it needed. England only really bankrupted itself in WWII. Where its decline began is hard to say. It may have been initiated way before coupon clipping and remittance men of Edwardian England became subjects of literature. How about sometime between the Crimean and Boer wars? An interesting take on Britain is in Correlli Barnett's reactionary book Collapse of British Power (History/20th Century History). He sees the decline as a function of free trade, public schools' crippling of ruling-class moral fiber, post WWI pacifism, and the greater cost of defending the empire and Commonwealth in comparison to its military return especially during WWII. As for the Dutch Republics, I guess I need to find a good economic history of them. From I had thought their small population and increasing cost of shipping made them hopelessly outflanked by their larger English neighbors. The Dutch had prospered by early textile manufacture, shipping cheaper (paying their sailors less in the Baltic trade) and stealing weaker Portugal's overseas entrepots. ( See Charles Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800 and John Keay The Spice Route: A History (California Studies in Food and Culture).) In the end the Dutch Republics were outcompeted and outfought by England.
Despite the shortcoming in Phillips' comparative history, his clarion call of decline is well taken. I like to think of Fulbright's "arrogance of power." We are headed for a fall, but maybe not the apocalypse Phillips trumpets. Our increased productivity from the US lead in computers has a lot to do with the wealth generated since the late 1980's. That is production, not finance. It just was, and still is, being lopsidedly distributed leading to private splendor (fed much by finance) and public squalor. The consequences of Lyndon Johnson's guns and butter and the 70's oil boycott stopped middle/lower-middle class growth and Reagan reached into their pockets and gave their subsidence to the upper/middle and upper classes along with a giant share of the new productivity. More people should read Phillips' books. But then it is not in many peoples', who know better and vote, interest to advocate for his implied solutions. It might preclude million dollar houses, jet-setting and three Volvos in the drive way . And as for the lower classes who might really profit from his criticism, they are too busy paying their subprime mortgages, watching television, playing video games or shopping at Wal-Mart. So we have a world of unnecessary conflicts and economic injustice. Remember Tolstoy's description of the Russian nobility ignoring Napoleon's advance on Moscow. Rather than Götterdämmerung, we have the twilight of our empire which is OK because of all the harm to which our arrogance has led. Our successors, the Chinese, don't give any sign they will dominate the world any more fairly.
Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

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Good but pesamistic

This book is very well researched and much of the financial market is playing out in the ways predicted by the book. I found it informative and very useful for a group discussion that my coworkers had on the topic as part of a Staff Ride.

My only critique of the book is that it is big on problems but short on solutions. He tries to express the silver lining and talk about the ways out at the end of the book but it is a little late after a largely depressing look at where our country and economy are.

I would recommend "The Post American World" if you are looking for a good complimentary book.

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