by Bethany McLean ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2015
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
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More by Joe Nocera
BOOK REVIEW
by Joe Nocera & Bethany McLean
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera
by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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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SEEN & HEARD
by Enrico Moretti ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2012
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's...
A fresh, provocative analysis of the debate on education and employment.
Up-and-coming economist Moretti (Economics/Univ. of California, Berkeley) takes issue with the “[w]idespread misconception…that the problem of inequality in the United States is all about the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent.” The most important aspect of inequality today, he writes, is the widening gap between the 45 million workers with college degrees and the 80 million without—a difference he claims affects every area of peoples' lives. The college-educated part of the population underpins the growth of America's economy of innovation in life sciences, information technology, media and other areas of globally leading research work. Moretti studies the relationship among geographic concentration, innovation and workplace education levels to identify the direct and indirect benefits. He shows that this clustering favors the promotion of self-feeding processes of growth, directly affecting wage levels, both in the innovative industries as well as the sectors that service them. Indirect benefits also accrue from knowledge and other spillovers, which accompany clustering in innovation hubs. Moretti presents research-based evidence supporting his view that the public and private economic benefits of education and research are such that increased federal subsidies would more than pay for themselves. The author fears the development of geographic segregation and Balkanization along education lines if these issues of long-term economic benefits are left inadequately addressed.
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's more profound problems.Pub Date: May 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-75011-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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