what's on my reading table: Madrick, Age of Greed (2011)

Jeff Madrick.
Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House LLC), 2011.

Book information:
Publisher; Books at author's website; Google Books; Amazon.com, hardcover; Amazon.com, paperback.

Author information:

Jeff Madrick, his website.
Jeff Madrick, The Century Foundation.
The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School for Social Research, New York.
Jeff Madrick, Adjunct Professor, The Cooper Union, New York.
Jeff Madrick, Wikipedia.
Jeff Madrick at The New York Review of Books.
Challenge.
Jeff Madrick, Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World, New York: Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House LLC), 2014.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
Seven Bad Ideas surveys the ideological justifications for the deregulated financial free market activities whose history Madrick describes in Age of Greed. The two books complement each other; the two together provide a more complete view of the period than each does individually.

Video and Audio: Jeff Madrick

Neil Grabois, Max Fraad-Wolff, David Gold, Jeff Madrick, "Economics and Politics of the Debt Debate," The New School, New York City, 29 April 2011.
Jeff Madrick and Sam Seder, "Greed, Banksters and the Finance industry destroying America," The Majority Report, 02 June 2011.
Audio link.
Jeff Madrick, "Decline of America," Cooper Union, New York City, 02 June 2011.
(There is another copy of this talk on YouTube with the title "economic history; from 1970 to the economic crisis today.")
This talk is a good introduction to and summary of Age of Greed.
Jeff Madrick, "Age of Greed," New America Foundation, Washington, D.C., 14 June 2011.
Event information at New America Foundation.
Jeff Madrick and Paul Jay, "Age of Greed," TheRealNews.com:
Part 1, 30 June 2011.
Part 2: Finance and Take-Overs Overwhelm Reforming Manufacturing, 02 July 2011.
Part 3: The '90s and "Finance is Always Good", 04 July 2011.
Part 4: People Should Get Organized, 06 July 2011.
Juan Gonzalez, Amy Goodman, Jeff Madrick, "U.S. Debt Default Looms as Talks Stall on Deficit Reduction: “We Are Playing with Fire”," Democracy Now!, 15 July 2011.
Jeff Madrick and Paul Jay, "How Dangerous is This Moment?" TheRealNews.com, 17 August 2011.
Jeff Madrick and Susan Modaress, "The Autograph," PressTV, 24 August 2011.
Jeff Madrick, "Book Discussion on Age of Greed," Hue-Man Bookstore & Cafe, New York City, BookTV, C-SPAN, 30 August 2011.
Jeff Madrick, "Age of Greed blames Wall Street ‘in league’ with Washington," Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 27 September 2011.
SoundCloud audio link.
Janell Sims, "Madrick's "Age of Greed" Says Wall St. In League With Washington," Shorenstein Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 29 September 2011.
Margaret Hoover, Mort Zuckerman, Howard Dean, Jeff Madrick, "Grandma's Benefits Imperil Junior's Future," Intelligence Squared U.S., 04 October 2011.
Video at YouTube.
Jeff Madrick, Frederick Kaufman, Ken Cook, "How Money, Incentives, and Industry Concentration Influence Our Food System," James Beard Foundation Food Conference, 12-13 October 2011.
- Event information at James Beard Foundation.
- Press release at James Beard Foundation, 27 September 2011.
- Frederick Kaufman, "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It," Harper’s Magazine, July 2010.
- Frederick Kaufman, "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It," Democracy Now!, 16 July 2010.
- Steve Strongin, "Response to “The Food Bubble” by Fredrick Kaufman in Harper’s Magazine, Letter to the Editor," Goldman Sachs, 08 July 2010.
- Ken Cook, Environmental Working Group.
Jeff Madrick and Sam Seder, "Wednesday November 30 2011," Majority Report with Sam Seder, 30 November 2011.
Jeff Madrick, Joseph Stiglitz, "Rediscovering Government: Welcome and Joseph Stiglitz Keynote," Roosevelt Institute, 21 June 2012.
Madrick's introductory remarks here summarize a theme in Age of Greed.
Jeff Madrick, Bob Herbert, Kim Phillips-Fein, Rick Perlstein, Joe Soss, "Rediscovering Government: Why America Turned Against Government," Roosevelt Institute, 21 June 2012.
Article about the event at Roosevelt Institute.
Article about presentations at Roosevelt Institute.
The New School copy.
- Bob Herbert, Demos.
- Bob Herbert, Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America, New York: Doubleday (Penguin Random House), 2014.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Kimberly Phillips-Fein, New York University.
- Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. (The paperback edition has the modified title Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal.)
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Rick Perlstein, Wikipedia.
- Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, New York: Hill and Wang, 2001; New York: Nation Books (Perseus Books Group), 2009.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, New York: Scribner (Simon & Schuster), 2008.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: the Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Joe Soss, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.
Jon Bakija, Peter Lindert, Lant Pritchett, "Rediscovering Government: Do Big Government and Higher Taxes Impede Growth?" Roosevelt Institute, 21 June 2012.
After watching the above talks from the Roosevelt Institute meeting, I idly wondered whether any of the other sessions at that meeting were any good. Fortunately, this was the first I tried and I found it so good that I must include it here. The data presented by Bakija is important and should be more widely known. But I especially like the talks by Lindert and Pritchett.
- Jon Bakija, Department of Economics, Williams College (scroll down for his books and papers).
- Joel Slemrod and Jon Bakija, Taxing Ourselves: A Citizen's Guide to the Debate over Taxes, Fourth Edition, The MIT Press, 2008.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Peter Lindert, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis.
- Peter Lindert, website with his papers, etc.
- Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century: Volume 1, The Story, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Peter Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century: Volume 2, Further Evidence, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700, Princeton University Press, 2016.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Jon Bakija, Lane Kenworthy, Peter Lindert, Jeff Madrick, How Big Should Our Government Be?, University of California Press, 2016.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Lant Pritchett, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
- Lant Pritchett, website with his papers, etc.
- Lant Pritchett, The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning, Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development and Brookings Institution Press, 2013.
  [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]

Book Reviews and other essays:

Paul Krugman, "Who Was Milton Friedman?" The New York Review of Books, 15 February 2007.
Robert Kuttner, "Seven Deadly Sins of Deregulation -- and Three Necessary Reforms," The American Prospect, 16 September 2008.
Steve Weinberg, "Book review," The Dallas Morning News, 03 June 2011.
Julian Brookes, "Jeff Madrick on How Wall Street Won and America Lost," Rolling Stone, 24 June 2011.
Jeff Madrick, "The Squandered Wealth of Nations: The Age of Greed," Triple Crisis (blog), 30 June 2011.
Tyler Cowen, "Masters of the Universe," Finance and Development: A quarterly magazine of the IMF, June 2011.
Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, "The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why?" The New York Review of Books, 14 July 2011.
Krugman and Wells ask:

Why did the regulators abdicate — and keep abdicating despite repeated financial disasters? This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Madrick’s otherwise excellent book: we get a lot of the what, but not much of the why. Madrick’s character-centered narrative makes it seem as if the triumph of greed was the result of a series of contingent events: the inflation of the 1970s, the exploitation of that inflation by Reagan and Friedman, the wheeling and dealing of the likes of Sandy Weill, and the diffidence of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Yet surely there must have been deeper forces at work.
Madrick provides an answer to this question in his newer book Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World (2014). The "deeper forces at work" are an ideological edifice that permeates U.S. business, government, academia, and political discourse, that is the discipline of economics as practiced in the U.S.
Mike Konczal, "From Mass Prosperity to Severe Recession in Fifty Years," The Nation, 19 July 2011.
Sebastian Mallaby, "Why We Deregulated the Banks," The New York Times, 29 July 2011.
David Greenberg, "Book review," The Washington Post, 29 July 2011.
Harry Blutstein, "Book Review," The Ascent of Globalisation (blog), 31 December 2011.
Henry Ehrlich, "Citibank, Citizen Wriston, and the Age of Greed," new geography, 07 January 2012.
Larry Polivka, "The Growing Neoliberal Threat to the Economic Security of Workers and Retirees," The Gerontologist, Vol. 52, No. 1, pages 133–148, 2012.
Larry Polivka, "Back To The Future: Restoring Economic Security for Workers and Retirees," The Gerontologist, Vol. 48, No. 3, pages 404-412, 2008.
Jeff Madrick, "Why Jack Welch Knows About Changing Numbers," The Anti-Economist (blog), Harper's Magazine, 10 October 2012.
DAH (Don Hatch?), "Two Book Reviews," The Enlightenment: A Mini-Journal of the Humanist Association of London and Area, Vol. 9, No. 8, pages 4-6, October 2013.
See also the essay that follows this review, "Can the Middle Class be Revived?"
John D. Leshy, "Reflections on Social Change and Law Reform," University of Colorado Law Review, Vol. 84, pages 217-228, 2013.
Chris Gay, "Five Books on the Financial Crisis: A Look at Some Prominent Attempts to Chronicle What Happened in 2008-09," The Wall Street Journal, 07 December 2014.
Joseph Gilbert, "Massive Strategic Failures in the Financial Services Industry," Journal of Applied Business and Economics, Vol. 16, No. 6, pages 26-31, 2014.
A business school professor discusses "studying the recent strategic failures using the techniques of the business disciplines." He omits issues related to corruption and regulation.

Some Wikipedia Articles:

Financial Crises since 1970:

Economic history of the United States: Inflation woes: 1970s.
1973 oil crisis.
1973–74 stock market crash.
1973–75 recession.
Stagflation: The Great Inflation.
Stagflation in the United States.
1979 energy crisis.
Early 1980s recession in the United States.
Early 1980s recession. This article also discusses the effect of the recession in worsening the business conditions for Savings and Loans which would have consequences later in the decade.
Latin American debt crisis, early 1980s.
1982 financial crisis in Mexico.
1987 stock market crash, also known as Black Monday, 19 October 1987.
Savings and loan crisis, late 1980s.
The costs of this crisis contributed to the Early 1990s recession.
Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992 (British pound withdrawn from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism).
Mexican peso crisis, 1994.
1994 bond market collapse:
- "The great bond massacre," Fortune, 1994.
- "A Brief History of Bond Market Disasters," Madison Investment Advisors, 16 August 2012.
- Claudio E. V. Borio and Robert N. McCauley, "The Anatomy of the Bond Market Turbulence of 1994," Working Paper No. 32, Bank for International Settlements, December 1995.
1997 Asian financial crisis.
1998 Russian financial crisis.
Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, 1998.
Dot-com bubble, 1997-2000; collapsed 1999-2001.
Enron scandal, revealed October 2001.
WorldCom accounting scandals, revealed 2002.
Subprime mortgage crisis.
Financial crisis of 2007–08.
Great Recession.

In Age of Greed Madrick surveys the financial history of the United States since 1970 by reviewing the careers of various key figures and representative men. These people are:

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Madrick, Age of Greed (2011)