Even after the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, America is still beset
by the depredations of an oligarchy that is now bigger, more profitable,
and more resistant to regulation than ever. Anchored by six
megabanks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo,
Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—which together control assets
amounting, astonishingly, to more than 60 percent of the country’s gross
domestic product, these financial institutions (now more emphatically
`too big to fail”) continue to hold the global economy hostage,
threatening yet another financial meltdown with their excessive
risk-taking and toxic `business as usual” practices. How did this come
to be—and what is to be done? These are the central concerns of 13 Bankers, a brilliant, historically informed account of our troubled political economy.
In 13 Bankers,
Simon Johnson—one of the most prominent and frequently cited economists
in America (former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund,
Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT, and author of the controversial
`The Quiet Coup” in The Atlantic)—and James Kwak give a
wide-ranging, meticulous, and bracing account of recent U.S. financial
history within the context of previous showdowns between American
democracy and Big Finance: from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, from
Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They convincingly show
why our future is imperiled by the ideology of finance (finance is
good, unregulated finance is better, unfettered finance run amok is
best) and by Wall Street’s political control of government policy
pertaining to it.
As the authors insist, the choice that America
faces is stark: whether Washington will accede to the vested interests
of an unbridled financial sector that runs up profits in good years and
dumps its losses on taxpayers in lean years, or reform through stringent
regulation the banking system as first and foremost an engine of
economic growth. To restore health and balance to our economy, Johnson
and Kwak make a radical yet feasible and focused proposal: reconfigure
the megabanks to be `small enough to fail.”
Lucid, authoritative, crucial for its timeliness, 13 Bankers is certain to be one of the most discussed and debated books of 2010.
EAN: 9780307379054
Vydavateľstvo: Pantheon
Autori: Simon&frasl Johnson, James Kwak
Rok vydania: 2010
Jazyk: Anglický