Punchy prose and canny muckraking make for an informative, entertaining challenge to economic orthodoxy.
An unholy alliance of Wall Street bankers, energy traders, OPEC pooh-bahs and complaisant government regulators are pillaging the American economy, according to these savvy, feisty polemics.
Learsy, a commodities trader, updates his previous entry in this series with a new collection of his Huffington Post blogs. His pieces circle around two great swindles: First, the government bailout of select financial institutions, especially its rescue of insurance giant AIG; he alleges that Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein cooked up the bailout during secret phone calls so that Goldman’s and other banks’ holdings of AIG derivatives could be paid off with taxpayer money. Second, the run-up in oil prices was in a market the author believes to have been glutted by stored oil and manipulated refinery capacities. (Learsy thinks petroleum should be trading for around $30 per barrel, not $100.) Here Learsy targets many culprits: banks that speculate in oil using virtually free loans from the Fed and FDIC-insured deposits; Saudi officials who restrict oil output; President Obama, who could burst the price bubble by selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; and newspapers that peddle peak-oil alarmism, which Learsy smartly debunks. Other selections support a high-speed rail system, warn of looming global food shortages, and cheerlead for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Learsy’s writing has a blunt, plainspoken style—sample headline: “The Oil Market Plays Casino While the Obama Administration Acts as Croupier”—that sits well with his populist indictment of Wall Street and its patsies in Washington. He has an insider’s knowledge of the intricacies within the global financial web, which he explains with clarity and biting wit; yet he’s not afraid to take bold, iconoclastic positions. (Among his anti-market heresies are calls for nationalizing the oil industry and establishing an American grain cartel.) At times, though, Learsy’s prescriptions trip over themselves; economists and environmentalists will choke at his suggestion that we step up off-shore drilling to bring down oil prices—and then impose gasoline rationing to force Americans to conserve. But that’s just one questionable pitch among better cases to be made in this take-no-prisoners savaging of the global economy’s oily underbelly.
Punchy prose and canny muckraking make for an informative, entertaining challenge to economic orthodoxy.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1469903293
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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