Current Economic Crisis: History and Underlying Causes
Experience and retrospect are teachers, but not necessarily successful teachers—based on U.S. FIRE (financial, insurance, real estate) actions of the last few decades.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (1992): Though written in the aftermath of the late 80s/early 90s financial disasters, this short book's portrayal of a growing class-based schism in the U.S. (and Europe) has become more, not less, relevant. The Contented have written the rules for decades, but the current crisis threatens their comfort.
Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000: How a little-read rider on a congressional bill fed Wall Street greed, bled Main Street, and fed the 2008 economic collapse.
Brooksley Born's quixotic fight to regulate the financial industry in the late 1990s.
Frontline's Warning: 50-min video segment about Brooksley Born and the ill-fated opposition to derivative regulation by Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin, and Larry Summers.
The Quiet Coup: Ex-IMF chief economist exposes the capture of our federal government by the FIRE industries (The Atlantic, May 2009).
Baseline Scenario—The Financial Crisis for Beginners: What's a CDO? a credit default swap? a currency crisis? a "bad bank?" and lots more. This site is an excellent resource, with lots of in-depth articles, links to radio and video, and more.
Kevin Phillips, Bad Money (2008): "Reckless finance, failed politics, and the global crisis of American capitalism." Published in early 2008, this book recognized that the hubris of the FIRE industries was priming the U.S., and the world, for a massive economic disaster.
The Giant Pool of Money: The best place to learn about what happened in the housing and mortgage industries in 2000–2008 (This American Life, May 2008, 59 min.).
Credit Crunch Primer (Aug 2007): Very effective, prescient summary by Stoneleigh (TOD).
Debt Man Walking: Brief summary (New Republic, Dec 2008) of our debt debacle.
Wall Street Lays Another Egg: Niall Ferguson's long, well-written article in Vanity Fair (Dec 2008) charts the greed, naiveté, and stupidity of the FIRE industries ("Planet Finance").
How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? Paul Krugman's long, accessible article in the NY Times (Sept 09) discusses schools of economic thought, group delusion, and "now what?"
The Mistakes Economists Make: Dave Cohen continues the economist-bashing (easy to do, I know), highlighting these economic gems: (1) People are rational. (2) Endless growth is possible. As he points out, these two disprove (1)—at least regarding economists.
Bill Moyers interview w/Marcy Kaptur & Simon Johnson: Scathing denunciation of modern banking/financial institutions (Oct 2009). Why are we not more outraged yet?
What Wall Street Owes You or other writings by Janet Tavakoli, who works in structured finance: Explication of Wall Street's sociopathic (my term, not heres) behavior—giving specific names, dates, actions, etc.
Citigroup's 2005 Plutonomy report for investment clients: From the summary: "The U.S., UK, and Canada are the key plutonomies—economies powered by the wealthy...In plutonomies the rich absorb a disproportionate chunk of the economy and have a massive impact on reported aggregate numbers....There is no 'average consumer' in a plutonomy. Consensus analyses focusing on the 'average' consumer are flawed from the start."
The Anti-Ecology of Money: Thought-provoking column about the "tertiary economy" and industrial bubble from John Michael Greer, July 22 2009.
The Empire of Debt is Collapsing: July 2008 post by Charles Hugh Smith that summarizes the underlying causes of the imminent collapse of our debt pyramid.
The New Road to Serfdom: Prescient 2006 article in Harpers by Michael Hudson describes the coming real estate collapse and effective serfdom of U.S. mortgage holders. Figures are slightly blurred, but text is very lucid and jargon-free. Recommended. Requires Harpers subscription (sorry!).
The Wealth Gap & The Collapse of the U.S.: Article on chrismartenson.com (Aug 2009) summarizes arguments that deregulatory periods (early 1900s, 1980-present) result in transfer of U.S. wealth to very small fraction of the populace, and threaten U.S. social stability.
The Global Collapse: A Non-Orthodox View (Walden Bello, March 2009): "Overaccumulation" may not ring a bell, but read the first paragraph of this clearly written paper and you'll know why mainstream economists and their media pets don't describe the collapse this way. Don't stop there—read the entire paper. Highly recommended.
Tenacious G: New York magazine story (July 2009) about Goldman Sachs: Evil? or just good at what they do? Plenty of evidence here for the former option.
The real story of inflation in the U.S. (Jantzen/iTulip, April 2008); lots of insight and provocative ideas in this pre-collapse article (see especially p. 3).
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine (2007): Compelling explication of how imposition of the modern version of "free-market" economics on developing countries
has shackled democracy, distorted the distribution of wealth, and contributed to the world mess as we know it.
I.O.U.S.A. (2008): This 80-min documentary, completed in early 2008, analyzes the U.S. fiscal crisis (remember, this is pre-late 2008 freefall) with emphasis on our public debt.. Much of the movie follows non-partisan "fiscal activitists" including David Walker, who resigned from his post as U.S. Comptroller General in order to take the message to the public.