Riveting, for those who can persevere through the slack prose.
With hours of expert testimony on Enron before Congress under his belt, Partnoy (Law/Univ. of San Diego) also draws on his own experience in selling the arcane contracts known as derivatives to put an investor’s dilemma into perspective.
The author’s previous work, F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street (not reviewed), warned of the dangers inherent in financial instruments created for the sole purpose of allowing companies to evade financial regulations. Here, he goes back some 17 years, naming the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Bankers Trust, its CEO and chairman Charles Sanford, and his wunderkind, Andy Krieger, as key figures in the origination of the kinds of investment banking deals and “swaps” that eventually snared firms like Enron, Worldcom, and others. As the banks soon found out, the temptation for companies to place bets on interest or exchange-rate fluctuations in order to fund business ventures as cheaply as possible was irresistible from the start. Partnoy makes it appallingly clear that as these hedges against debt have evolved and become increasingly convoluted, the number of takers who will never understand them, much less profit from them, has continued to swell. For example: one structured note’s terms included a variable based on the number of wins by the NBA’s Utah Jazz. Partnoy makes a telling point in stressing that Enron’s deals and those of other now-scandal-plagued companies were basically not illegal and were all enumerated in annual reports in some occluded form or other. Perhaps the worst news for investors is that in Partnoy’s view the government’s response, last summer’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act, was “weak and limited” because Congress “had no blueprint” and was merely responding to public pressure to place blame. The markets today are “like Swiss Cheese,” he claims, “with the holes—the unregulated places—getting bigger every year as [rules beaters] eat away at them from within.”
Riveting, for those who can persevere through the slack prose.Pub Date: April 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7267-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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