CHASING GOLDMAN SACHS, a ten-year-old alarm bell that we all ignored

CHASING GOLDMAN SACHS: How the Masters of the Universe Melted Wall Street Down... and Why They'll Take Us to the Brink Again
SUZANNE McGEE
Currency
$4.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: You know "what" happened during the financial crisis ... now it is time to understand why the financial system came so close to falling over the edge of the abyss and "why 'it could happen again.'" Wall Street has been saved, but it hasn't been reformed. What is the problem? Suzanne McGee provides a penetrating look at the forces that transformed Wall Street from its traditional role as a capital-generating and economy-boosting engine into a behemoth operating with only its own short-term interests in mind and with reckless disregard for the broader financial system and those who relied on that system for their well being and prosperity.

Primary among these influences was "Goldman Sachs envy" the self-delusion on the part of Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, Stanley O'Neil of Merrill Lynch, and other power brokers (egged on by their shareholders) that taking more risk would enable their companies to make even more money than Goldman Sachs. That hubris–and that narrow-minded focus on maximizing their short-term profits–led them to take extraordinary risks that they couldn't manage and that later severely damaged, and in some cases destroyed, their businesses, wreaking havoc on the nation's economy and millions of 401(k)s in the process.

In a world that boasted more hedge funds than Taco Bell outlets, McGee demonstrates how it became ever harder for Wall Street to fulfill its function as the financial system's version of a power grid, with capital, rather than electricity, flowing through it. But just as a power grid can be strained beyond its capacity, so too can a financial grid collapse if its functions are distorted, as happened with Wall Street as it became increasingly self-serving and motivated solely by short-term profits.

Through probing analysis, meticulous research, and dozens of interviews with the bankers, traders, research analysts, and investment managers who have been on the front lines of financial booms and busts, McGee provides a practical understanding of our financial "utility," and how it touches everyone directly as an investor and indirectly through the power–capital–that makes the economy work.

Wall Street is as important to the economy and the overall functioning of our society as our electric and water utilities. But it doesn't act that way. The financial system has been saved from destruction but as long as the mind-set of "chasing Goldman Sachs" lingers, it will not have been reformed. As banking undergoes its biggest transformation since the 1929 crash and the Great Depression, McGee shows where it stands today and points to where it needs to go next, examining the future of those financial institutions supposedly "too big to fail."

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: My 2010 review stands as written. It's not like Author McGee didn't warn us.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but does the world *really* need another book about The Meltdown That Ate Our Jobs? Do we *really* have anything left to learn about these greedy so-and-sos whose pursuit of their own profits gifted us with a huge expansion of the Federal debt?

In a word, yes.

Suzanne McGee (a good friend of mine) assumes that her readers are smart, savvy, and plugged in, so she hits only the highlights of the WHAT about the crisis. Her brief, as the subtitle of the book "How the Masters of the Universe Melted Down Wall Street...and Why They'll Take Us to the Brink Again" makes clear, is analyzing and explaining WHY.

She does this in as honest and non-judgmental a way as anyone could. She's not pointing fingers at one person per chapter, she's pointing up the systemic and cultural failings that, quite naturally and seemingly inevitably, led to a culture of no-risk gambling that permeated late twentieth century business. It took until the end of the Aughties for the chickens to come home to roost, but as they always do, they did. And who pays? All of us peons, that's who, which is exactly how the system is set up and remains set up to this day.

Her style is spare, unfussy, and dryly witty. Her story provides its own plot, so I can't say whether she's good at plotting. She knows how to give a telling detail!

"When {the New York Stock} Exchange is public, when people are willing to own it, it's a sign of a stable financial system, argues {a Canadian investment-firm billionaire}," who also owns stakes in publicly traded stock exchanges worldwide, from Europe to Latin America...The kind of push that come from shareholder-investors to become more competitive and efficient is the best way to make sure an organization is as effective as possible, he adds."

This comes in a book that traces "efficiency" as the principal author of the megadisaster of 2008...and does anyone remember May 2010, when the "efficient" robo-trading powerslide of the Exchange caused further systemic fantods?

McGee states, makes, and supports her points throughout this book with a lifetime's reportorial experience and a skeptic's "prove it" attitude. She's done the financially semi-literate a huge and signal service in writing this book. It's a good, involving, and deeply frightening read. Recommended to all who still think deregulation of any industry is a good idea.

PREDATOR NATION, a seven-year-old wake-up call as trenchant now as it was then

PREDATOR NATION: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
CHARLES H. FERGUSON
Currency
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators’ path to conquest.
Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.
· Finance has become America’s dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.
· The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.
· Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.
· Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world’s most unequal and unfair societies.

If you’re smart and a hard worker, but your parents aren’t rich, you’re now better off being born in Munich, Germany or in Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New York.

This radical shift did not happen by accident.

I BORROWED THIS BOOK FROM THE LIBRARY. THANK GOODNESS I HAVE A LIBRARY NEAR ME! SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY FOR A BETTER WORLD.

My Review: I am second to none in my passionate love for and gratitude to the United States of America for the astoundingly amazingly wonderfully free-from-want life I lead.

And as that life is, day by day, taken from me piecemeal by the rich, the greedy, and the stupid, I am going to shout and point and wave my arms a lot to get the attention of the few, the many, the unwilling or willing, to see if I can't effect some small change to build on.

Count on it.

This library book was a fourteen-day loan, and I've had it seventeen days. I couldn't read much at a time because it made me furious, hysterically angry, livid to the point of stroke. I am disabled by a chronic, genetically transmitted condition that causes severe and painful acid buildup on my joints and near areas that have tendons. (Check the photos on my profile...that claw-lookin' thing is my left hand.) I have health care AND get prescriptions for the medicines that ameliorate my disabling condition. As they are given under regular supervision, I am able to avoid the problem of renal failure that comes with more than one of the medications, not to mention horrible gastric consequences, which I just have to put up with.

And in this rich nation, would you like to know what the princely payout to me, to enable me to survive? A little under $1200 a month. Food stamps, $150 a month at most, can't be awarded to someone in assisted living. Medicaid and Medicare, working in tandem, keep my illnesses from becoming *dire*. These programs, which here in New York State are more generous than most places, are part of the privilege I experience as an old white man with friends whose positions of experience and power were used to my benefit in acquiring my safety net. And, were it not for the charity of friends, not please be assured my family members, oh nay nay nay, never dare even to ask them for help (well, now, one aunt handed over $4000 as I was losing my house, which put off the evil day for several months), I would've been completely unable to face the wall of bureaucracy still less get what I need. Imagine that case, ill and despairing and truly at rock bottom, without my white male privilege. The COVID-19 plague's ravages fall disproportionately on poorer communities; many of those people are wage-earners on the ragged edge already; their employers are firing right and left, unemployment is running out, and many are simply unable to make do without private charity. Which has a limit.

And then what? I don't know.

I am, as you see, not alone in my predicament. I am, in fact, a reasonably common-or-garden recipient of the fucking that corporations and CEOs and banks are doling out to each and every one of us not in their club. It's not new, this phenomenon. It was for millennia the norm. Then, one day in 1773, a group of rowdy, angry, sick-of-it colonists in Boston (of all places) said “oh fuck you” to king and church and country. Go Massachusetts!

Now, 240 years on, the rotten sleazy fucks we kicked out of power are back with a vengeance, thanks to 1) greedy politicians, 2) evil, evil, evil preachers, 3) stupid, complicit conservatives and “libertarians” (aka the Authoritarian's Best Friends League), and last but not least the laziest, most astoundingly selfish population of “future millionaires” (tip: if daddy wasn't a millionaire, you won't be either, sure as the sun rises in the east) ever fattened up for the slaughter on the American Dream (of what? for whom?).

No. I don't mean the immigrants. I don't mean the union workers. I mean you. The person who doesn't know who his/her state senator is. Who the county tax assessor is. Who watches fucking idiot-box crap and not presidential debates because it's too hard, it's boring, it doesn't matter anyway.

Welcome to what happens when you're not paying attention.

And you deserve it.

I, on the other hand, who have voted and shouted and waved my arms about this shit since 1980, do not. But here I am in the same goddamned boat as the lazy, the stupid, the religious, the conservative or libertarian. Is that in any way fair? No. It sucks wookiee balls. (Nobody likes hair in their teeth.)

But still, there it is. Hate is written into state constitutions because the Jesus Brigade for Tradishnull Fambly Valyews (aka Focus on the Family, et alii) doesn't like faggots. State senators, the same goddamned fucks in the GOP who authorize spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on casinos, *still* want to cut funding for public health IN THE MIDDLE OF A PLAGUE.

And this angry, prescient book details how it got this way, why it stays this way, and, in one short ending chapter, what possible means there are to combat it. I am not, by nature, an optimistic person. I sincerely believe that humans love one thing more than hate, and that's group hate. Food, sex, money...all significantly farther down the list. Hate is the killing ape's favorite pastime. What else (as we see increasingly obviously in 2020) is fandom, sports or TV or celebrity? What else is religion, politics? So I expect things will get worse, because the haters like that. Everyone should suffer!

And so we do. In our billions, we suffer. Unnecessarily, inexcusably, preventably. And so it goes.

But it does not have to. Everyone, and I mean every last one, of the US's eligible voters has a moral duty to vote in the November 2020 elections. The entire House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, and the Presidency of the United States of America need to be elected. All of those offices need to be held by people whose ideas and goals for the USA are in line with yours...and I am willing to bet that a lot of y'all have undergone some sort of shift in those goals.

So get out and vote!