Readers of this maddening, sharp report will rightly wonder why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been allowed to survive and...
The housing sector is a house of cards.
So economics writer McLean (co-author: All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, 2010, etc.)—who, having covered Enron in The Smartest Guys in the Room and the financial meltdown of 2008, knows a thing or two about such constructs—reveals in this report from the trenches. One conclusion comes early on in this latest book, a brief exposé: namely, that we have it all backward by privatizing health care and socializing mortgages, the reverse of most countries. “Most of the mortgage market in this country,” writes McLean, “is now supported by government agencies, more so than it was before the financial crisis.” Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other government-sponsored enterprises may have helped precipitate the crisis—as the author notes, by 2006, almost three-quarters of all mortgages issued in the U.S. were less than prime—but they weren’t the only causes. Furthermore, though the surviving banks are pretty much back to normal, the mortgage market is not, retaining its old vulnerabilities while layering on bureaucracy. The result: when the next crisis comes, McLean suggests evenhandedly, the mortgage sector will lead the decline. The author charts the situation in vigorous prose whose arguments are often announced in her chapter titles (“The $9 Billion Accounting Fraud,” “Mr. Hedge Fund Goes to Washington”). What is clear is that the mortgage market requires reform of various kinds, particularly to rein in its tendency to value profit over fundamentals. What is less clear is just how to effect such reform, with recent efforts amounting to a roundabout way “to rebuild a system that, in a key way, would have been similar to what we had”—and that would still leave taxpayers with the burden of paying for the mistakes of the private sector.
Readers of this maddening, sharp report will rightly wonder why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been allowed to survive and why we can’t do better.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9909763-0-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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