Autoren-Bilder

Andere Autoren mit dem Namen Desmond King findest Du auf der Unterscheidungs-Seite.

Desmond King (1) ist ein Alias für Desmond S. King.

10 Werke 102 Mitglieder 2 Rezensionen

Werke von Desmond King

Getagged

Wissenswertes

Für diesen Autor liegen noch keine Einträge mit "Wissenswertem" vor. Sie können helfen.

Mitglieder

Rezensionen

Wishing we were Canada

The basic problem is that while government is purposely structured to foster delays, obstruction and compromise, central bankers come to the Fed table “largely in agreement with the bankers’ view of the world.” They take care of their billionaire friends, and ignore the millions who lost their homes. The Fed is populated by bankers rather than career civil servants. Everyone there is looking for the jump to a far more lucrative post in banking. Your financial health and safety are of no concern, according to Fed Power.

Unlike any other body but the Supreme Court, the Fed is an independent government with the government. It bows to no one, makes investments at will, makes profits, and spends it at will. It (now) has the right to print money at will, buy whole banks and businesses when it feels the need, and supports the financial sector to the exclusion of all else. After all, big finance lobbies on the Fed’s behalf, continuously, so it’s only fair. In the context of the constitution of the United States, this is wrong.

There is precious little the Fed reveals about itself. Jacobs and King have collected what there is, and plowed through the minutes the Fed publishes – years after the fact. The book follows the history of the need for a central bank, and the milestones of the years since it came to be in 1913. In addition to everyone’s complaints about the Fed, they expand on these:
-The Fed is simply overtaking fiscal policy in the USA.
-Its scope creep over the decades has become a scope explosion as it takes over tasks and territory (notably from the Treasury Department) at will.
-It made 21,000 transactions on its own account between 2007 and 2009, totaling $7.7 trillion
-It, along with big finance, drains all the best brains away from innovation and industry, with its inequality-building salaries. With those brains, they produce literally nothing.
-The whole problem goes back to Herbert Hoover who amended section 13 (3) to allow the Fed to “act in unusual and exigent circumstances,” apparently without oversight, reporting or restriction.

The authors’ solution, which they mention throughout, is Canada. Canada’s central bank went through little of the crisis and debt and foreclosures that the US did, because it is professionally managed by career civil servants, who work in far more transparent circumstances, overseen by Parliament. The restrictions on banks and mortgages are far more stringent, yet far from crippling the financial sector, Canada’s six major national banks are among the biggest in the world, and big players in the US. Finally, the head of the bank, Mark Carney, was hired across the ocean to run the Bank of England, the first such appointment in history. They must think he knows something they (and clearly Americans) don’t.

David Wineberg
… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
DavidWineberg | Dec 24, 2015 |
I awarded two stars not because it is horrible but because it is disappointing. There's a lot of critical consideration of other writers on the same or related topics, somewhat less historical data, and a lot less actual presentation and discussion of the thesis. That means there's a fair amount of padding, but mainly there's a lot of repetition.

The thesis discussion is divided among the first 9 chapters, so you really do have to read the entire thing to get the entire argument. Each chapter's new bit is buried within the critique, data, padding, and repetition, though. I suppose that does make it a faster read than it would seem at first, but at the risk of getting careless and skipping over the new bits.

Each chapter is ostensibly about a different aspect of the subject, but really each is a rehash of the overall thesis with a different emphasis, rather like this:

Wow, that was neat.
Wow, that was neat.
Wow, that was neat.
Wow, that was neat.

Each new emphasis does enlarge on the thesis somewhat, and adduce some relevant data, but not nearly enough of either to warrant the roughly 30 pages that each chapter gets. With all of the critical evaluation of other scholars' work, it reminds me of nothing so much as a bunch of separate but related grad-school papers (not even a thesis in the other sense) between two covers.

This is all so disappointing because the thesis of the book is very good, deserving of greater attention and greater development, and there was a lot of new-to-me history. This book should be so much better! Why isn't it?

My other big complaint, related to the above but standing out given the topic, is that there is no unified discussion of specifics of immigration legislation. I reached Chapter 9 before discovering that there was an appendix that laid all this out, but the text did not refer to it, and it should at least have done that. As it was I felt lost by some of the arguments because they seemed to assume knowledge of the legislation that I did not have; thanks to context and Wikipedia I was able to work through my difficulties, but there is no good reason not to make that information crystal clear, one way or the other, at the beginning of the text.
… (mehr)
 
Gekennzeichnet
drbubbles | Aug 11, 2010 |

Dir gefällt vielleicht auch

Nahestehende Autoren

Statistikseite

Werke
10
Mitglieder
102
Beliebtheit
#187,251
Bewertung
3.0
Rezensionen
2
ISBNs
45

Diagramme & Grafiken