Aftershock (eBook)

Robert B. Reich (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010 | 1. Auflage
192 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-59452-5 (ISBN)

Infos

A brilliant new reading of the economic crisis--and a plan for dealing with the challenge of its aftermath--by one of our most trenchant and informed experts.

When the nation's economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street. But Robert B. Reich suggests a different reason for the meltdown, and for a perilous road ahead. He argues that the real problem is structural: it lies in the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top, and in a middle class that has had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decent standard of living.

Persuasively and straightforwardly, Reich reveals how precarious our situation still is. The last time in American history when wealth was so highly concentrated at the top--indeed, when the top 1 percent of the population was paid 23 percent of the nation's income--was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Such a disparity leads to ever greater booms followed by ever deeper busts.

Reich's thoughtful and detailed account of where we are headed over the next decades reveals the essential truth about our economy that is driving our politics and shaping our future. With keen insight, he shows us how the middle class lacks enough purchasing power to buy what the economy can produce and has adopted coping mechanisms that have a negative impact on their quality of life, how the rich use their increasing wealth to speculate, and how an angrier politics emerges as more Americans conclude that the game is rigged for the benefit of a few. Unless this trend is reversed, the Great Recession will only be repeated.

Reich's assessment of what must be done to reverse course and ensure that prosperity is widely shared represents the path to a necessary and long-overdue transformation. Aftershock is a practical, humane, and much-needed blueprint for both restoring America's economy and rebuilding our society.

From the Hardcover edition.

Textauszug

Eccles's Insight The Federal Reserve Board, arguably the most powerful group of economic decision-makers in the world, is housed in the Eccles Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. A long, white, mausoleum-like structure, the building is named after Marriner Eccles, who chaired the Board from November 1934 until April 1948. These were crucial years in the history of the American economy, and the world's. While Eccles is largely forgotten today, he offered critical insight into the great pendulum of American capitalism. His analysis of the underlying economic stresses of the Great Depression is extraordinarily, even eerily, relevant to the Crash of 2008. It also offers if not a blueprint for the future, at least a suggestion of what to expect in the coming years. A small, slender man with dark eyes and a pale, sharp face, Eccles was born in Logan, Utah, in 1890. His father, David Eccles, a poor Mormon immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland, had come to Utah, married two women, became a businessman, and made a fortune. Young Marriner, one of David's twenty-one children, trudged off to Scotland at the start of 1910 as a Mormon missionary but returned home two years later to become a bank president. By age twenty-four he was a millionaire, by forty he was a tycoon--director of railroad, hotel, and insurance companies, head of a bank holding company controlling twenty-six banks, and president of lumber, milk, sugar, and construction companies spanning the Rockies to the Sierra Nevadas. In the Crash of 1929, his businesses were sufficiently diverse and his banks adequately capitalized that he stayed afloat financially. But he was deeply shaken when his assumption that the economy would quickly return to normal was, as we know, proved incorrect. 'Men I respected assured me that the economic crisis was only temporary,' he wrote, 'and that soon all the things that had pulled the country out of previous depressions would operate to that same end once again. But weeks turned to months. The months turned to a year or more. Instead of easing, the economic crisis worsened.' He himself had come to realize by late 1930 that something was profoundly wrong, not just with the economy but with his own understanding of it. 'I awoke to find myself at the bottom of a pit without any known means of scaling its sheer sides. . . . I saw for the first time that though I'd been active in the world of finance and production for seventeen years and knew its techniques, I knew less than nothing about its economic and social effects.' Everyone who relied on him--family, friends, business associates, the communities that depended on the businesses he ran--expected him to find a way out of the pit. 'Yet all I could find within myself was despair.' When Eccles's anxious bank depositors began demanding their money, he called in loans and reduced credit in order to shore up the banks' reserves. But the reduced lending caused further economic harm. Small businesses couldn't get the loans they needed to stay alive. In spite of his actions, Eccles had nagging concerns that by tightening credit instead of easing it, he and other bankers were saving their banks at the expense of community--in 'seeking individual salvation, we were contributing to collective ruin.' Economists and the leaders of business and Wall Street--including financier Bernard Baruch, W. W. Atterbury, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Myron Taylor, chairman of the United States Steel Corporation--sought to reassure the country that the market would correct itself automatically, and that the government's only responsibility was to balance the federal budget. Lower prices and interest...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.9.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre
• ISBN-10: 0-307-59452-1 / 0307594521
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-59452-5 / 9780307594525