Saving Capitalism - Keeping America Strong

Informationen zum Autor PAT CHOATE  is a political economist, policy analyst, and the author of the books Dangerous Business , Agents of Influence , Hot Property , The High-Flex Society , America in Ruins , and, with Ross Perot, of Save Your Job, Save Our Country . A new book, Preparing for War , is forthcoming from Knopf. In 1996, he was Ross Perot's vice presidential running mate. He lives with his wife outside Washington, D.C. Klappentext When the U.S. financial structure collapsed in fall 2008! it quickly became clear that our system of market capitalism was broken! endangered by decades of absolutist market dogma! shortsighted policies! and the abandonment of America's working people. Now! as the Obama administration seeks to repair the country's economy! one thing is clear: this crisis calls for drastic reforms. Regrettably! the government's response! so far! has been inadequate. In Saving Capitalism! economist and bestselling author Pat Choate offers six game-changing actions that can strengthen the U.S. economy now and stimulate long-term! self-sustaining! noninflationary economic growth that will create millions of better jobs. Here are proposals for: • Major tax reform • All-encompassing financial regulation • A strong social safety net • A major infrastructure program • Ways and means to balance U.S. trade with the rest of the world • The renewal of national innovation Urgent and provocative! Saving Capitalism is an accessible and informative dissection of the gravest threat our economy has faced since the Great Depression! and a bold and creative blueprint for the future. Chapter One MONEY An unending economic hurricane has been ripping apart the U.S. and world economies since December 2007. In the seventeen months between then and April 2009, the number of unemployed Americans increased by seven million. By April 2009, almost 5.4 million of the nation's 45 million home loans, worth more than $717 billion, were delinquent or in foreclosure. Although the pace of decline seemed to be slowing by the early summer of 2009, far worse is yet to come in 2010. The Treasury Department's stress test of the nineteen largest banks in early 2009 revealed that they could be forced to write off as much as a fresh $600 billion by the end of 2010, increasing their losses to more than $1 trillion. Most of those mortgage defaults will be by people now at work, who once were thought financially immune to such distress, but now are likely to lose their jobs and then their family homes. The lender of last resort, the federal government, has tried to blunt this depression with unprecedented levels of money infusions into the U.S. economy. Despite federal commitments of almost $9 trillion for direct investments, $1.7 trillion for guarantees, and $1.4 trillion for loans, plus a cut of the Federal Reserve loan rate to banks of almost zero, the prolonged freeze in credit markets cracked only slightly by the spring of 2009. In the last quarter of 2008 and the first of 2009, auto production fell by half and global trade declined at the fastest pace since the Great Depression. The governments of Europe, Japan, and China are engaged in massive bailouts of their economies. Yet the bottom of this depression is not visible, let alone a domestic or global upturn. America's money industry is directly to blame for much of the world's economic meltdown. It gambled with other people's money and lost, used faulty risk-assessment tools, and knowingly sold fraudulent assets, including hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime mortgages, for vast profits. The administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush enabled Wall Street's recklessness by scrapping the regulatory safeguards Franklin Roosevelt had erected in the 1930s. Equally significant, the U.S. Federal Reserve System, Securities ...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Pat Choate
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 08.09.2009
• EAN: 9780307474834
• ISBN: 978-0-307-47483-4
• Pagine: 288
• Dimensioni: 131 mm x 203 mm x 22 mm
• Serie: Vintage Originals; Vintage Originals
• Categoria: Scienze sociali, diritto, economia > Scienze politiche > Scienze politiche e cittadinanza attiva