User Reviews Send this to a friend
The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It
 
Manufacturer: Chelsea Green Publishing
Customer Rating:
 
List Price: $14.95
Sale Price: $10.17
Availibility: Usually ships in 24 hours
Free Shipping Available
Buy Now
 

Product Description
"I loved this book. A worms'-eye dissection of the Wall Street crisis from a very sharp and very knowledgeable labor economist. Here's hoping that before the Washington consensus gets set in stone, policymakers will read it and reflect on the havoc the masters of the universe have wreaked on ordinary people."
--Charles Morris, author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash and Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen
How could the best and brightest (and most highly paid) in finance crash the global economy and then get us to bail them out as well? What caused this mess in the first place? Housing? Greed? Dumb politicians? What can Main Street do about it?

In The Looting of America, Leopold debunks the prevailing media myths that blame low-income home buyers who got in over their heads, people who ran up too much credit-card debt, and government interference with free markets. Instead, readers will discover how Wall Street undermined itself and the rest of the economy by playing and losing at a highly lucrative and dangerous game of fantasy finance.

He also asks some tough questions:
  • Why did Americans let the gap between workers' wages and executive compensation grow so large?
  • Why did we fail to realize that the excess money in those executives' pockets was fueling casino-style investment schemes?
  • Why did we buy the notion that too-good-to-be-true financial products that no one could even understand would somehow form the backbone of America's new, postindustrial economy?
  • How do we make sure we never give our wages away to gamblers again?
  • And what can we do to get our money back?
In this page-turning narrative (no background in finance required) Leopold tells the story of how we fell victim to Wall Street's exotic financial products. Readers learn how even school districts were taken in by "innovative" products like collateralized debt obligations, better known as CDOs, and how they sucked trillions of dollars from the global economy when they failed. They'll also learn what average Americans can do to ensure that fantasy finance never rules our economy again.

As the country teeters on the brink of what could be the next Great Depression, we should be especially wary of the so-called financial experts who got us here, and then conveniently got themselves out. So far, it appears they've won the battle, but The Looting of America refuses to let them write the history—or plan its aftermath.

Product Details
  • ISBN13: 9781603582056
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Video Reviews
No video reviews found for this product.

Customer Reviews
Smart, punchy, eye-opening
 
Review Date: May 21, 2009
Reviewer: Laura McClure,
An extremely lively and lucid account of the economic crisis and how we got here. Since reading it, I actually find myself able to talk coherently about credit default swaps - and that's saying something. Unbelievably, this book makes derivatives almost easy to understand. It also exposes, with lightness and humor, the high-level greed and corruption that has caused so many people to lose their homes and jobs. Bring out the pitchforks!
Read this book!!
 
Review Date: May 31, 2009
Reviewer: Carola Norton, Olympia, WA
A must read for those of us who started to believe the worst is over. But be forewarned: this book will reawaken the anger, frustration, and fear you felt during the 2008 crash. The book clearly explains what happened and why. You'll finally be able to understand collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), credit default swaps (CDS), and all that "fantasy finance." And there's a handy glossary in case your grasp of these tricky topics starts to slip again. The book is a page-turner. There was a point where I couldn't put it down.
Elucidating
 
Review Date: May 27, 2009
Reviewer: Philip Dray, Brooklyn NY
I had read and liked Leopold's previous book about labor leader Tony Mazzochi, so was curious about this new title. This is a shorter, more compact book, but that's one of its virtues. It takes on the task of explaining what the heck just happened to our economy, and lays it all out in readable prose, carefully outlining the various shaky financial products that proved to be worthless and that somehow missed the due attention of regulators. The author does a good job of identifying both the culprits and victims of this scam, and offers a compelling explanation for why a vibrant labor movement might have helped keep the banking and corporate titans honest. This is not a happy book, because one senses the problems Leopold discusses are not going to disappear overnight. He has a very nice touch as a writer, weaving easy-to-follow examples and analogies throughout the text. But it's not "economics for dummies" by any means. He's obviously done his homework and the material has depth and intellectual heft. I'd recommend this to anyone seeking a greater understanding of the "crash of 08," and its significance for us all.
Unfortunately, this preaches to the choir
 
Review Date: July 3, 2009
Reviewer: Anthony Lawrence, Middleboro, MA USA
Just minutes after I finished reading this I happened to be standing in a long, slow moving line at a store. Someone wondered why they didn't have more clerks working just before a long holiday weekend and the man in front of me voiced the opinion that "nobody wants to work anymore". Somehow that led us into a discussion of the Wall Street/Banking crash.

His first comment was "It's Barney Frank's fault". Of course I knew he was referring to the Community Reinvestment Act. I challenged him on that, but he just got more angry.

Unfortunately, attitudes like his (and the 1 star review below) are pretty common. I call it "Fox News" mentality. Nothing is going to change their minds.

It's sad. The vast majority of these people aren't wealthy, but they are singing the song the wealthy want them to sing.

Anyway, this is a great book. I loved the analogy to "fantasy baseball"; indeed, that's exactly what this is all about. I'd love to see some sort of multiplicative wage cap as he suggested - even if it were set at 100 times the low end it would still do good! However, any suggestion of that will just cause our Fox News loving friends to insist that doing that will just drive executive talent overseas. Of course they will have been fed that line by greedy people who actually would be affected by such a cap.

I had not understood the full impact of the "CDO squared" games until I read this. I tried to explain some of that to the man I mentioned above; he'd have none of it: this was strictly from sub-prime lending to poor people and it was all Barney Frank's fault. End of discussion.

It's refreshing to read someone who knows they don't have all the answers. Economics is complicated, and good intentions can lead to unexpected horrors. But, as he says, we've tried the "let the wealthy have whatever they want". That sure hasn't worked. Why don't we try not letting them have so much for a while and see what happens?

It looks like a no-brainer: returning wealth to the middle and lower class would decrease welfare needs, increase demand for real goods, and increase governments overall tax take. What's not to like? Oh, yeah, the super-rich would only be "ordinary rich". Gosh, that's awful - guess we can't do that!
A friendly guide through the morass
 
Review Date: June 8, 2009
Reviewer: Richard Van Wagenen,
Imagine -- a page-turner about economics! Les Leopold skillfully throws a lifeline to those of us who struggle to understand how and why our financial system failed so spectacularly in 2008. Using plain language and engaging examples, he shows how Wall Street's exotic financial products sopped up the excess private capital created by the Reagan-Bush tax cuts and stagnation of real wages in the face of productivity growth. His humanity and humor help temper the reader's outrage at the greed, gullibility, and ideological blindness that brought our economy to the brink of collapse. His prescriptions for change are a mixed bag, and he mostly avoids critiquing the policies our government is pursuing now. But anyone who wants to understand how and why we got to where we are should start with this valuable book.

Tagged with: •

Filed under: Finance

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!