A Plan to Restore American Prosperity
First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity. John B. Taylor. W.W. Norton & Company 2012, pp. 235, $24.95 Unless something dramatic happens in the Persian Gulf, this year’s presidential election could very well hinge on the unemployment rate in November 2012. While January’s unemployment numbers had to have been somewhat encouraging for the White [...]
The Dollar Abides
Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System. Barry Eichengreen. Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 215, $27.95 The Great Recession, precipitated in part by excessively low interest rates in the early 2000s, has caused more Americans to pay attention to monetary policy than they have in [...]
The Banking Dead
Zombie Banks: How Broken Banks And Debtor Nations Are Crippling the Global Economy. Yalman Onaran. Bloomberg Press, 2012, pp. 184, $34.95 Over the past several years, both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have been at the forefront of criticizing the federal government’s bailout of large financial institutions. While their criticism is generally [...]
The Legacy of the Crash: How the Financial Crisis Changed America and Britain. Edited by Terrence Casey. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 291, $32.00 Historians, when studying economic or political events, often focus on whether a particular historical occurrence represents a break from, or continuity with, the past. There is, for instance, a general consensus that [...]
Too Much or Too Little Regulation?
New Directions in Financial Services Regulation. Edited by Roger B. Porter, Robert R. Glauber, and Thomas J. Healey. The MIT Press 2011, pp. 227, $35.00 What caused the financial crisis of 2008? Three years after the American financial system teetered on the brink of collapse, analysts and pundits have proffered differing theories as to how [...]