Managed by the Markets
How Finance Re-Shaped America
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The current economic crisis reveals just how central finance has become to American life. Problems with obscure securities created on Wall Street radiated outward to threaten the retirement security of pensioners in Florida and Arizona, the homes and college savings of families in Detroit and Southern California, and ultimately the global economy itself. The American government took on vast new debt to bail out the financial system, while the government-owned investment funds of Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Malaysia, and China bought up much of what was left of Wall Street. How did we get into this mess, and what does it all mean?
Managed by the Markets explains how finance replaced manufacturing at the center of the American economy and how its influence has seeped into daily life.
From corporations operated to create shareholder value, to banks that became portals to financial markets, to governments seeking to regulate or profit from footloose capital, to households with savings, pensions, and mortgages that rise and fall with the market, life in post-industrial America is tied to finance to an unprecedented degree. Managed by the Markets provides a guide to how we got here and unpacks the consequences of linking the well-being of society too closely to financial markets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This academic analysis of our evolution from an industrial to a postindustrial "portfolio society" offers provocative clues for anyone seeking to understand the current financial crisis and Americans' financial security. Davis, professor of management at the University of Michigan, asserts that in the eras of financial capitalism (1900 1930) and managerial capitalism (1930 1980), Americans looked to the corporation and long-term savings to provide them with security. In the wake of the takeovers and financial move to high risk savings in the 1980s, and deregulation and corporate scandals in the late 1990s, however, Americans have become disillusioned with the corporation as a source of lifetime employment and retirement capital and have instead relied on financial markets for security and "wealth creation." In describing George W. Bush's "ownership society," Davis notes that "when individuals come to see themselves as free agent investors, the consequences for society can be dire." While a compelling read, this book offers few predictions for the new investor society, suggesting only that big government might have to clean up the mess that individual Americans have made.
