Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present
by Jeff Madrick

Product Description

A vividly told history of how greed bred America’s economic ills over the last forty years, and of the men most responsible for them.

As Jeff Madrick makes clear in a narrative at once sweeping, fast-paced, and incisive, the single-minded pursuit of huge personal wealth has been on the rise in the United States since the 1970s, led by a few individuals who have argued that self-interest guides society more effectively than community concerns. These stewards of American capitalism have insisted on the central and essential place of accumulated wealth through the booms, busts, and recessions of the last half century, giving rise to our current woes.

In telling the stories of these politicians, economists, and financiers who declared a moral battle for freedom but instead gave rise to an age of greed, Madrick traces the lineage of some of our nation’s most pressing economic problems.

He begins with Walter Wriston, head of what would become Citicorp, who led the battle against government regulation. He examines the ideas of economist Milton Friedman, who created the plan for an anti-Rooseveltian America; the politically expedient decisions of Richard Nixon that fueled inflation; the philosophy of Alan Greenspan, on whose libertarian ideology a house of cards was built on Wall Street; and the actions of Sandy Weill, who constructed the largest financial institution in the world, which would have gone bankrupt in 2008 without a federal bailout of $45 billion. Significant figures including Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Jack Welch, and Ronald Reagan play key roles as well.

Review

Americans in 2011 have a lot to be unhappy about: high unemployment, entire neighborhoods of foreclosed houses, decimated retirement accounts and portfolios, and so on for far too many depressing statistics. Since the Crisis of 2007-08 we've grown accustomed to talking heads wisely explaining that this is part of a cycle of boom and bust that is unavoidable. Really? Jeff Madrick's well researched and engaging history of the last 40 years or so has a very different view.

Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s financiers began to pressure the US government to ease or eliminate many of the provisions to regulate the financial markets that had been put into place during the New Deal. Their efforts began to bear fruit in the 1970s, when both Republican and Democratic Administrations and Congresses, heavily influenced by advice from wealthy bankers and brokers, agreed to dismantle most of the regulatory structure. This deregulatory process gained strength in the 1980s and 1990s, again at the hands of both parties, and finally bore fruit in the 2000s when the markets collapsed and came close to dragging the entire world into another Great Depression. Like most people, I remember those frightening days all too well, but I didn't fully understand what was going on and I certainly didn't know what to expect in the future.

Jeff Madrick has done an excellent job of chronicling the financial decisions and decision makers of the last four decades. He provides many short but thorough biographies of the principal actors, some well known or infamous like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, others less public but still important like Lewis Uhler and Walter Wriston. Having this background information makes the decisions of Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and the eight presidents since 1970 more understandable and also more disheartening. Throughout the book Madrick returns to the main moral: while the men who gambled with the economy often made vast fortunes and gained enormous prestige, the middle class saw their pay stagnate, their pensions shrivel, and their houses lose value. The solution is obvious, but Madrick delineates it carefully: the regulatory structure that shriveled during the "good times" must be reinstated and strengthened, and future political leaders need to spend less time listening to Wall Street and more time on Main Street.

Intense economic inequity and instability is the story of our age, and Jeff Madrick tells it with style, clarity, and an unerring command of his subject.

by John D. Cofield