AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Trouble With Money by William Greider, William S. Rukeyser, Anthony C. Kiser ISBN: 0-9624745-0-9 Publisher: Whittle Communication Pub. Date: 01 November, 1989 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Still full of foreboding: things could get worse
Comment: There are more than a dozen full-page ads throughout this, showing in pictures the enormous capacity at "1:29 AM, Memphis, Tennessee. Fleet ready for loading at main hub" (p. 9) and other aspects of "the largest all-cargo air fleet in the world" (p. 9) that reinforce the feeling that everybody needs to have lots of money or this country's bankers won't be the only unhappy people in the world. In a *GO JET* world, the final picture, with a caption, "working to meet the needs of business throughout the world," (on the page after 94), might even be uplifting after a text which urges, "People had better start to find their voice for the emerging debate" (p. 94) about regulating our financial institutions again, so this "Larger Agenda Series" text seems like a hardcover magazine with one long article at times. William Greider is still a top reporter on the state of the economy. THE TROUBLE WITH MONEY is mainly about the American economy. Written in 1989, when the dollar was incredibly strong due to high interest rates, which brought in the flood of foreign investments able to finance growing trade deficits and federal deficits by furnishing an increasingly speculative market for debt, banks were failing at record rates. The price of oil was too low for people with huge mortgages to pay their loans in Texas, while manufacturers paying workers American dollars suffered from a decreasing ability to sell their products in the rest of the world. I'm so stuck in 2003 now, only 14 years later, that complaining about anything in this book is like a drunken bat out for blood that dried up a long time ago. But I'm as upset over the current news about any predictions of improvement in the global economy, a constant hope of those who are looking for the next big spurt of growth that would prevent the kind of collapse that I will attempt to provide in a factual analysis of this book, though at this point, the effort is as much psychiatric anamnesis as the entertainment value of the question in the form of an offer: do you want to bet?

Every percent of something is different from a percent of something else, and this applies mainly to the U.S. Department of Commerce chart on page 70, "Inflation-Adjusted Interest Rates." With a positive 4.42 percent in the 1980s, Greider thinks "the bloated interest rates of the 1980s were rivaled during only one other period in this century--the Roaring Twenties, when similarly distorted social values were in full play." (p. 71). Those who check the numbers at the bottom of the chart will discover a whopping negative 5.13 percent for the 1940s, showing that lenders had little chance of getting their money back at the same value, as time was changing the situation greatly in favor of those who could use money productively. Today's interest rates might seem small to us, "but, historically, 0.35 percent represents a generous rate of real return on short-term T-bills." (p. 70). These numbers were from "Alan Greenspan, the new Federal Reserve chairman, in the fall of 1988 provided the Senate banking committee with some stunning economic figures that, curiously, the press ignored. Greenspan's numbers described the bedrock reality of the 1980s and explained much about the turbulent era--the lopsided prosperity at the top, the periodic financial crises, the erosion of corporate balance sheets, and other unsettling developments . . . plainly about the true cost of money." (p. 69). When the government needed money for World War II, "The Fed, in those years, kept nominal long-term rates at a steady, stable 2 percent, and federal deficits as a percentage of the gross national product then dwarfed the deficits of the Eighties." (p. 71). Constantly comparing things to a drunken bat might not make our situation much clearer, but the federal deficit for the fiscal years ending in 2003 and 2004 might seem large when they are compared to the numbers which this book has preserved.

"The ingenious politicians had found a way to commit upward of $160 billion in public money to rescue the S&Ls--with only marginal impact on the reported federal deficit." (p. 4)

"The New York Fed itself, for instance, served in 1986 as a clearinghouse for a daily flow of financial transactions exceeding $1 trillion . . . Roughly speaking, that meant that each day Wall Street was buying and selling and swapping pieces of financial paper with a presumed value equal to one-third of the U.S. gross national product." (p. 5).

"During 1984, First Boston, one of the world's leading bond houses, itself transacted deals totaling $4.1 trillion--exceeding the nation's GNP. . . . The market in interest-rate swaps, an esoteric investment that hardly existed at the beginning of the decade, then exceeded $150 billion in outstanding volume." (p. 6)

As of 2003, Pentagon plans to operate a financial market in terrorist events, with anonymous traders allowed to bet on when things would happen in the Middle East, as a reliable way for the Pentagon to learn about undercover operations that might or might not be controlled by geopolitical forces capable of operating from within the United States, have been kicked in the shins by a Congress which doubts its ability to provide proper investigations of those instances in the future when the smart money had the unexpected pegged long before intelligence reports made it to the upper levels. The attempt to set up a web page to allow internet activity by the end of 2003 on such bets says as much about the financial activities in which the American dollar is involved (bets could have been for or against, ending the kind of one-sided interest in the economy that this book is about) as the weird kinds of speculation that end up in Chapter 4, "Moral Hazard."