Next book

BROKERS, BAGMEN, AND MOLES

FRAUD AND CORRUPTION IN THE CHICAGO FUTURES MARKETS

Less than two years after federal 'commod' squads obtained indictments against over 40 traders at the Windy City's two principal futures exchanges, volume remains as high as ever. Even so, Greising (a Business Week correspondent) and Morse (a reporter for Knight-Ridder Financial News) leave little doubt in this savvy, if discontinuous, overview that there were—and are—scams and double-dealing aplenty in the pits of the Chicago Board of Trade and Mercantile Exchange. The authors offer an authoritative account of the FBI investigation that sent four undercover agents into the trading rings to collect evidence of illegal practices. In addition to an episodic briefing on the sting from its 1987 inception through the first trial verdicts, Greising and Morse provide institutional histories of the essentially self-regulated CBT and Merc. The futures exchanges furnish the global economy a valuable price- discovery mechanism, but, run as old-boy clubs, they apparently also give floor brokers a license to steal from hedgers and speculators alike. The authors make a generally good job of explaining how venal traders defraud clients as well as the IRS. They also probe the political alliances and payoffs that ensure an anything-goes trading environment, and they don't spare federal prosecutors who inflated the significance of nickel-and-dime cases. The impact of their charges and reform proposals, though, is blunted by a fractured format that arrests the narrative flow to no discernible purpose at critical junctures. Also, the story's a long way from over. While the Chicago office of the US Attorney General can claim upwards of 30 scalps (via plea bargains and convictions), more than a dozen of the accused have been acquitted or given an interim pass by juries that could not reach verdicts. A knowledgeable, albeit less than cohesive, progress report on a consequential scandal.

Pub Date: July 15, 1991

ISBN: 0-471-53057-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Wiley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1991

Next book

GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

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

Next book

THE NEW GEOGRAPHY OF JOBS

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

Close Quickview