A useful, if partial, sketch of an increasingly serious and topical fiscal issue.
A debut book offers a concise history and critique of American monetary policy.
Current debates about U.S. fiscal policy are typically ahistorical, assuming that a return to earlier interpretations of banking and currency regulation is implausible. Calabro, however, argues for precisely this, a rehabilitation of monetary policy based on a resumption of the gold standard, and the concomitant rejection of fiat money. To that end, the author furnishes a short history of American banking, from its largely decentralized genesis to the Federal Reserve’s response to the 2008 recession. According to the author, the critical mistake was the final abandonment of the gold standard, which not only removed a key limitation on the ad hoc creation of currency, but also permanently obscured the true value of goods and services, enshrining the threat of inflation. Furthermore, there was an unmooring of the value of savings: “In the absence of the gold standard there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.” Calabro contends that the establishment of the Federal Reserve—an act President Woodrow Wilson deeply regretted—had pernicious consequences not only for the health of the American economy, but democracy as well. The author discusses a basket of related issues—the absence of a true recovery from the last recession and the inadequacy of quantitative easing, the creation of hedge funds, derivatives, and the International Monetary Fund. He makes a spirited case for a more positive interpretation of President Ronald Reagan’s economic legacy, and lucidly contrasts Keynesian monetarism with the more market-oriented Austrian School of economics. Calabro is at his best broadly discussing grand theoretical and historical shifts rather than the minutiae of contemporary policy—it’s hard to be exceedingly rigorous or deep in under 100 pages. Furthermore, the author too digressively detours from the main thread of analysis in the final chapter, which includes a discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on immigration. For a quick primer on the development of American monetary policy, though, one could hardly do better—this study is accessible, sober, and comprehensive.
A useful, if partial, sketch of an increasingly serious and topical fiscal issue.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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