Main Street in Crisis

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 9780807846896
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (468 download)

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Book Synopsis Main Street in Crisis by : Catherine McNicol Stock

Download or read book Main Street in Crisis written by Catherine McNicol Stock and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1997-09-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of class during the Great Depression is the first to examine a relatively neglected geographical area, the northern plains states of North and South Dakota, from a social and cultural perspective. Surveying the values and ideals of the old midd

When Wall Street Met Main Street

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674061217
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis When Wall Street Met Main Street by : Julia C. Ott

Download or read book When Wall Street Met Main Street written by Julia C. Ott and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The financial crisis that began in 2008 has made Americans keenly aware of the enormous impact Wall Street has on the economic well-being of the nation and its citizenry. How did financial markets and institutions-commonly perceived as marginal and elitist at the beginning of the twentieth century-come to be seen as the bedrock of American capitalism? How did stock investment-once considered disreputable and dangerous-first become a mass practice? Julia Ott tells the story of how, between the rise of giant industrial corporations and the Crash of 1929, the federal government, corporations, and financial institutions campaigned to universalize investment, with the goal of providing individual investors with a stake in the economy and the nation. As these distributors of stocks and bonds established a broad, national market for financial securities, they debated the distribution of economic power, the proper role of government, and the meaning of citizenship under modern capitalism. By 1929, the incidence of stock ownership had risen to engulf one quarter of American households in the looming financial disaster. Accordingly, the federal government assumed responsibility for protecting citizen-investors by regulating the financial securities markets. By recovering the forgotten history of this initial phase of mass investment and the issues surrounding it, Ott enriches and enlightens contemporary debates over economic reform.

The Death and Life of Main Street

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 0807837563
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Death and Life of Main Street by : Miles Orvell

Download or read book The Death and Life of Main Street written by Miles Orvell and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

High Tide on Main Street

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780615637952
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (379 download)

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Book Synopsis High Tide on Main Street by : John Englander

Download or read book High Tide on Main Street written by John Englander and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW 2nd Edition (10-16-13) of best selling book that described a superstorm hitting Atlantic City and New York City -- exactly one week before Sandy. Just one of dozens of scenarios in this amazing book. Find out the other forecasts. Rave reviews from experts and Amazon readers. Fully updated and revised. New Introduction by Governor Christine Todd Whitman. For 6,000 years sea level has changed little. Now it it has started rising again, moving the shoreline too. In clear, easy-to-understand language, this book explains: * The science behind sea level rise, plus the myths and partial truths used to confuse the issue. * The surprising forces that will cause sea level to rise for 1,000 years, as well as the possibility of catastrophic rise this century. * Why the devastating economic effects will not be limited to the coasts. * Why coastal property values will go "underwater" long before the land does, perhaps as early as this decade. * Five points of "intelligent adaptation" that can help individuals, businesses, and communities protect investments now and in the future.

Modernizing Main Street

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226218023
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (262 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernizing Main Street by : Gabrielle Esperdy

Download or read book Modernizing Main Street written by Gabrielle Esperdy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important part of the New Deal, the Modernization Credit Plan helped transform urban business districts and small-town commercial strips across 1930s America, but it has since been almost completely forgotten. In Modernizing Main Street, Gabrielle Esperdy uncovers the cultural history of the hundreds of thousands of modernized storefronts that resulted from the little-known federal provision that made billions of dollars available to shop owners who wanted to update their facades. Esperdy argues that these updated storefronts served a range of complex purposes, such as stimulating public consumption, extending the New Deal’s influence, reviving a stagnant construction industry, and introducing European modernist design to the everyday landscape. She goes on to show that these diverse roles are inseparable, woven together not only by the crisis of the Depression, but also by the pressures of bourgeoning consumerism. As the decade’s two major cultural forces, Esperdy concludes, consumerism and the Depression transformed the storefront from a seemingly insignificant element of the built environment into a potent site for the physical and rhetorical staging of recovery and progress.

All the Devils Are Here

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101551054
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis All the Devils Are Here by : Bethany McLean

Download or read book All the Devils Are Here written by Bethany McLean and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here." -Shakespeare, The Tempest As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers? According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, the real answer is all of the above-and more. Many devils helped bring hell to the economy. And the full story, in all of its complexity and detail, is like the legend of the blind men and the elephant. Almost everyone has missed the big picture. Almost no one has put all the pieces together. All the Devils Are Here goes back several decades to weave the hidden history of the financial crisis in a way no previous book has done. It explores the motivations of everyone from famous CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers, analysts, and Wall Street traders. It delves into the powerful American mythology of homeownership. And it proves that the crisis ultimately wasn't about finance at all; it was about human nature. Among the devils you'll meet in vivid detail: • Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide, who dreamed of spreading homeownership to the masses, only to succumb to the peer pressure-and the outsized profits-of the sleaziest subprime lending. • Roland Arnall, a respected philanthropist and diplomat, who made his fortune building Ameriquest, a subprime lending empire that relied on blatantly deceptive lending practices. • Hank Greenberg, who built AIG into a Rube Goldberg contraption with an undeserved triple-A rating, and who ran it so tightly that he was the only one who knew where all the bodies were buried. • Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, aloof and suspicious, who suffered from "Goldman envy" and drove a proud old firm into the ground by promoting cronies and pushing out his smartest lieutenants. • Lloyd Blankfein, who helped turn Goldman Sachs from a culture that famously put clients first to one that made clients secondary to its own bottom line. • Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae, who (like his predecessors) bullied regulators into submission and let his firm drift away from its original, noble mission. • Brian Clarkson of Moody's, who aggressively pushed to increase his rating agency's market share and stock price, at the cost of its integrity. • Alan Greenspan, the legendary maestro of the Federal Reserve, who ignored the evidence of a growing housing bubble and turned a blind eye to the lending practices that ultimately brought down Wall Street-and inflicted enormous pain on the country. Just as McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room was hailed as the best Enron book on a crowded shelf, so will All the Devils Are Here be remembered for finally making sense of the meltdown and its consequences.

Bailout

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Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451684959
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (516 download)

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Book Synopsis Bailout by : Neil Barofsky

Download or read book Bailout written by Neil Barofsky and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes a new foreword to the paperback edition.

Out of Crisis

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317254910
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Out of Crisis by : David A. Westbrook

Download or read book Out of Crisis written by David A. Westbrook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former Federal Reserve chair Greenspan recently said that the risk management paradigm is broken; thus our understanding of financial regulation no longer makes sense. More generally, the current financial crisis obliges us to rethink the relationships among "financial markets" and "governments." In Out of Crisis financial analyst David Westbrook illuminates the intellectual, business, and policy errors that have led us into the present morass. Through a vivid legal and political analysis he shows how the ideologies of the right and left have distorted financial thinking and policy. Learning from these errors, the book sketches the emergence of a new understanding of risk management and bureaucratic regulation. Out of Crisis begins the tasks of rethinking the structures that constitute financial markets and exploring how such structures may be strengthened. Taking responsibility for the markets we build to do so much of our society's work, we may yet become mature capitalists.

The Watchdog That Didn't Bark

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231536283
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis The Watchdog That Didn't Bark by : Dean Starkman

Download or read book The Watchdog That Didn't Bark written by Dean Starkman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter details “how the U.S. business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past eighty years” (Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation). In this sweeping, incisive post-mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He examines the deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—that eroded journalism’s appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006. Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls “CNBCization,” and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite. “Can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why.”—Alec Klein, national bestselling author of Aftermath “With detailed statistics, Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy.”—Booklist

Bull by the Horns

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451672497
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (516 download)

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Book Synopsis Bull by the Horns by : Sheila Bair

Download or read book Bull by the Horns written by Sheila Bair and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A former FDIC chairwoman, who was among the first individuals to acknowledge the full risk of subprime loans, shares expert and insider perspectives on the economic crisis to assess contributing causes and ultimate ramifications.

From Main Street to Wall Street

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192636286
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis From Main Street to Wall Street by : Jesper Rangvid

Download or read book From Main Street to Wall Street written by Jesper Rangvid and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long run, economies grow. Over the shorter-term business cycle, economic activity contracts and expands. From Main Street to Wall Street examines both the long-run relation between economic growth and stock returns and the shorter-term business-cycle relation. It examines the complex relationship between the economy and the stock market, and guides readers through the fascinating interaction between economic activity and financial markets. From Main Street to Wall Street draws heavily on data, supporting academic theories with empirical facts, and backing up arguments in intuitive ways. It discusses how investors can use knowledge of economic activity and financial markets to formulate expectations to future stock returns, and helps scholars and practitioners navigate financial markets by understanding the economy.

Hidden in Plain Sight

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Publisher : Encounter Books
ISBN 13 : 159403866X
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis Hidden in Plain Sight by : Peter J. Wallison

Download or read book Hidden in Plain Sight written by Peter J. Wallison and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2008 financial crisis—like the Great Depression—was a world-historical event. What caused it will be debated for years, if not generations. The conventional narrative is that the financial crisis was caused by Wall Street greed and insufficient regulation of the financial system. That narrative produced the Dodd-Frank Act, the most comprehensive financial-system regulation since the New Deal. There is evidence, however, that the Dodd-Frank Act has slowed the recovery from the recession. If insufficient regulation caused the financial crisis, then the Dodd-Frank Act will never be modified or repealed; proponents will argue that doing so will cause another crisis. A competing narrative about what caused the financial crisis has received little attention. This view, which is accepted by almost all Republicans in Congress and most conservatives, contends that the crisis was caused by government housing policies. This book extensively documents this view. For example, it shows that in June 2008, before the crisis, 58 percent of all US mortgages were subprime or other low-quality mortgages. Of these, 76 percent were on the books of government agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. When these mortgages defaulted in 2007 and 2008, they drove down housing prices and weakened banks and other mortgage holders, causing the crisis. After this book is published, no one will be able to claim that the financial crisis was caused by insufficient regulation, or defend Dodd-Frank, without coming to terms with the data this book contains.

Makers and Takers

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Publisher : Currency
ISBN 13 : 0553447254
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (534 download)

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Book Synopsis Makers and Takers by : Rana Foroohar

Download or read book Makers and Takers written by Rana Foroohar and published by Currency. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Wall Street bad for Main Street America? "A well-told exploration of why our current economy is leaving too many behind." —The New York Times In looking at the forces that shaped the 2016 presidential election, one thing is clear: much of the population believes that our economic system is rigged to enrich the privileged elites at the expense of hard-working Americans. This is a belief held equally on both sides of political spectrum, and it seems only to be gaining momentum. A key reason, says Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar, is the fact that Wall Street is no longer supporting Main Street businesses that create the jobs for the middle and working class. She draws on in-depth reporting and interviews at the highest rungs of business and government to show how the “financialization of America”—the phenomenon by which finance and its way of thinking have come to dominate every corner of business—is threatening the American Dream. Now updated with new material explaining how our corrupted financial sys­tem propelled Donald Trump to power, Makers and Takers explores the confluence of forces that has led American businesses to favor balance-sheet engineering over the actual kind, greed over growth, and short-term profits over putting people to work. From the cozy relationship between Wall Street and Washington, to a tax code designed to benefit wealthy individuals and corporations, to forty years of bad policy decisions, she shows why so many Americans have lost trust in the sys­tem, and why it matters urgently to us all. Through colorful stories of both “Takers,” those stifling job creation while lining their own pockets, and “Makers,” businesses serving the real economy, Foroohar shows how we can reverse these trends for a better path forward.

The Cold War Comes to Main Street

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Author :
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700621881
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cold War Comes to Main Street by : Lisle A. Rose

Download or read book The Cold War Comes to Main Street written by Lisle A. Rose and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 1999-02-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1950, Main Street America-restored by victories in a global war and hopeful for a prosperous and peaceful future-was abruptly traumatized. The sudden prospect of thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union, Senator Joseph McCarthy's vicious anticommmunist crusade, and the beginning of the Korean War all combined to dampen the public mood. In the wake of these events, the Cold War invaded every home and convinced millions of Americans that the liberal establishment created by Franklin Roosevelt and sustained by Harry Truman had betrayed the public trust and placed the nation in mortal peril. Revealing the intense interplay between foreign policy, domestic politics, and public opinion, Lisle Rose argues that 1950 was a pivotal year for the nation. Thermonuclear terror brought "a clutching fear of mass death" to the forefront of public awareness, even as McCarthy's zealous campaign to root out "subversives" destroyed a sense of national community forged in the Great Depression and World War II. The Korean War, with its dramatic oscillations between victory and defeat, put the finishing touches on the national mood of crisis and hysteria. Drawing upon recently available Russian and Chinese sources, Rose sheds much new light on the aggressive designs of Stalin, Mao, and North Korea's Kim Il Sung in East Asia and places the American reaction to the North Korean invasion in a new and more realistic context. Rose argues that the convergence of Korea, McCarthy, and the Bomb wounded the nation in ways from which we've never fully recovered. He suggests, in fact, that the convergence may have paved the way for our involvement in Vietnam and, by eroding public trust in and support for government, launched the ultra-Right's campaign to dismantle the foundations of modern American liberalism. Engagingly written, The Cold War Comes to Main Street is a sophisticated synthesis that cuts to the core of a half-century of postwar national paranoia. It calls into question the assumptions of several generations of scholars about foreign affairs and domestic policies and will force readers to reconsider their assumptions about just when-and how-the nation lost its sense of community, confidence, and civility.

Main Street

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Publisher : BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN 13 : 3756897397
Total Pages : 587 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (568 download)

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Book Synopsis Main Street by : Sinclair Lewis

Download or read book Main Street written by Sinclair Lewis and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel written by Sinclair Lewis is set in the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a fictionalized version of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. The novel takes place in the 1910s, with references to the start of World War I, the United States' entry into the war, and the years following the end of the war, including the start of Prohibition. Satirizing small-town life, Main Street is perhaps Sinclair Lewis's most famous book, and led in part to his eventual 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature. It relates the life and struggles of Carol Milford Kennicott as she comes into conflict with the small-town mentality of the residents of Gopher Prairie. Highly acclaimed upon publication, Main Street remains a recognized American classic.

After the Music Stopped

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101605871
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis After the Music Stopped by : Alan S. Blinder

Download or read book After the Music Stopped written by Alan S. Blinder and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller "Blinder's book deserves its likely place near the top of reading lists about the crisis. It is the best comprehensive history of the episode... A riveting tale." - Financial Times One of our wisest and most clear-eyed economic thinkers offers a masterful narrative of the crisis and its lessons. Many fine books on the financial crisis were first drafts of history—books written to fill the need for immediate understanding. Alan S. Blinder, esteemed Princeton professor, Wall Street Journal columnist, and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, held off, taking the time to understand the crisis and to think his way through to a truly comprehensive and coherent narrative of how the worst economic crisis in postwar American history happened, what the government did to fight it, and what we can do from here—mired as we still are in its wreckage. With bracing clarity, Blinder shows us how the U.S. financial system, which had grown far too complex for its own good—and too unregulated for the public good—experienced a perfect storm beginning in 2007. Things started unraveling when the much-chronicled housing bubble burst, but the ensuing implosion of what Blinder calls the “bond bubble” was larger and more devastating. Some people think of the financial industry as a sideshow with little relevance to the real economy—where the jobs, factories, and shops are. But finance is more like the circulatory system of the economic body: if the blood stops flowing, the body goes into cardiac arrest. When America’s financial structure crumbled, the damage proved to be not only deep, but wide. It took the crisis for the world to discover, to its horror, just how truly interconnected—and fragile—the global financial system is. Some observers argue that large global forces were the major culprits of the crisis. Blinder disagrees, arguing that the problem started in the U.S. and was pushed abroad, as complex, opaque, and overrated investment products were exported to a hungry world, which was nearly poisoned by them. The second part of the story explains how American and international government intervention kept us from a total meltdown. Many of the U.S. government’s actions, particularly the Fed’s, were previously unimaginable. And to an amazing—and certainly misunderstood—extent, they worked. The worst did not happen. Blinder offers clear-eyed answers to the questions still before us, even if some of the choices ahead are as divisive as they are unavoidable. After the Music Stopped is an essential history that we cannot afford to forget, because one thing history teaches is that it will happen again.

Crisis!

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Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503610659
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Crisis! by : Cedric de Leon

Download or read book Crisis! written by Cedric de Leon and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely analysis of the power and limits of political parties—and the lessons of the Civil War and the New Deal in the Age of Trump. American voters have long been familiar with the phenomenon of the presidential frontrunner. In 2008, it was Hillary Clinton. In 1844, it was Martin Van Buren. And in neither election did the prominent Democrat win the party’s nomination. Insurgent candidates went on to win the nomination and the presidency, plunging the two-party system into disarray over the years that followed. In this book, Cedric de Leon analyzes two pivotal crises in the American two-party system: the first resulting in the demise of the Whig party and secession of eleven southern states in 1861, and the present crisis splintering the Democratic and Republican parties and leading to the election of Donald Trump. Recasting these stories through the actions of political parties, de Leon draws unsettling parallels in the political maneuvering that ultimately causes once-dominant political parties to lose the people’s consent to rule. Crisis! takes us beyond the common explanations of social determinants to illuminate how political parties actively shape national stability and breakdown. The secession crisis and the election of Donald Trump suggest that politicians and voters abandon the political establishment not only because people are suffering, but also because the party system itself is unable to absorb an existential challenge to its power. Just as the U.S. Civil War meant the difference between the survival of a slaveholding republic and the birth of liberal democracy, what political elites and civil society organizations do today can mean the difference between fascism and democracy.