Fiscal-policy wonks will find this look at the financial system illuminating, though ordinary investors and civilians will...
The chair of Barack Obama’s Global Development Council warns that the economy is bound for more bumpiness, stress, and course-altering ahead, “potentially quite suddenly.”
El-Erian (When Markets Collide, 2008) charts the changing role of central banks in national economies and the global economy at large. Their overarching mission is to provide their home nations with a stable currency and, beyond that, stable monetary and financial operations—macro goals that are defined by government but then effected by bankers. The bankers have lately exercised more and more autonomy, though, without much direct political control and with ever expanding responsibilities to govern the “fate of the global economy.” In the case of the Federal Reserve, for instance, stability is understood to involve providing for stable prices, economically productive interest rates, and a thriving job market while reducing risk—all good goals but hard to contain under one roof. In the new climate of a post-recessionary nervousness and a sluggish recovery without the elastic rebound of previous ones, the author suggests, we seem to be in a different mode than the business cycle of old. Consequently, central banks are experimenting, even making things up as they go along, in order to jump-start economies, for instance, by putting into place negative interest rates and other “unconventional monetary policies” without any precedent or historical examples to follow. The natural result is instability from above and below, from the supply side and the demand side, and a “new normal” that the author wishes could be seen as a “new abnormal.” Central banks, their briefs thus much expanded, must do what they can to contain market volatility. As El-Erian’s discussion moves on, it becomes increasingly technical so that, by the end, readers must contemplate the challenging implications of, say, limiting exposure to “any specific set of securities that has a repeated history of suddenly losing market liquidity.”
Fiscal-policy wonks will find this look at the financial system illuminating, though ordinary investors and civilians will find it daunting.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9762-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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
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