Entries Tagged 'Government' ↓

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan (Princeton University Press, 2010)

 
Authors’ Note: Recently several people have told me this series is depressing. That certainly wasn’t my intention. We are in a time of rising hopes in this country. That is great. But rising hopes don’t always come to fruition.

Raj’s chapters point out specific dangers that may impede our progress in this century.

We prepare for natural disasters, especially out here in California. So why not for man-made disasters? It’s just common sense.

Chapter Six “When Money is the Measure of All Worth”

Those of us who worry about derivatives will find this chapter useful.

We live in turbulent times, and the upcoming U.S. Presidential election is overshadowing financial changes that are going on here and abroad.

We’re in a time of high financial volatility that keeps dropping and then creeping upward. Our economy is good—for now. But we know that danger could lurk ahead in our future. Past history teaches us that.

Raj notes that Securitization goes back centuries – in the 1800s to the French monarchy sold annuities to wealthy men. Swiss bankers purchased these French government annuities and took out life insurance on “suitable girls” in Geneva.

Those annuities were then bundled and and resold at a higher price to investors. What happenened next ? The bubble burst. Sound familiar? Continue reading →

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan (Princeton University Press, 2010)

 
Who should read this book? Short answer: Anyone, who like me, wishes to see economists build a model for explaining economics on a world-wide basis.

“Raj” Raghuram is not just examining how the Financial Crisis happened in the first decade of this century. He is also helping to build a global view of economics in his books. Raj is particularly interested in the differences between what economists call “developing” and “developed” countries.

That’s because, as we will see in Part Three of this book review, the previous Financial Crisis was not just limited to the U.S.: it affected the rest of the world as well.

The dominant schools of economic thought in the U.S., Keyesian and Chicago Schools of economics are limited to being national rather than global in scope. But it is much more likely that the next Financial Crisis will be global in scope.

Here’s are short synopsis of Fault Line‘s first five Chapters Continue reading →

The New Rules of War: Victory in The Age of Durable Disorder (© 2019) is a book written by a Harvard-trained scholar. You can verify that fact by the amount of footnotes in the back of the book. 

But don’t let that stop you! This is a book for anyone interested in the history of war—and the changes in the way wars are conducted in the Twenty First Century.

Sean McFate brings this book to life by telling numerous stories from history, starting as far back as centuries before the Bible, and leading up to the present.

The stories Sean tells to support his views of ancient and modern of warfare are also drawn from virtually every geographic area of the globe—even the oft-ignored Central Asian “istans,” i.e., Kurdistan and Turkistan, and Uzbekistan. [“stan” meaning ‘land’ in Persian] Continue reading →