Why Save the Bankers?
And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Reflections on politics, the economy, and the modern world by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Thomas Piketty’s work has proved that unfettered markets lead to increasing inequality, and that without meaningful regulation, capitalist economies will concentrate wealth in an ever smaller number of hands, threatening democracy. For years, his newspaper columns have pierced the surface of current events to reveal the economic forces underneath.
Why Save the Bankers? collects these columns from the period between the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. In crystalline prose, Piketty examines a wide range of topics, and along the way he decodes the European Union’s economic troubles, weighs in on oligarchy in the United States, wonders whether debts actually need to be paid back, and discovers surprising lessons about inequality by examining the career of Steve Jobs. Coursing with insight and flashes of wit, these brief essays offer a view of recent history through the eyes of one of the most influential economic thinkers of our time.
“Easy to follow for readers without much knowledge of economics, especially when [Piketty] picks apart topics that defy classical economic logic; in this he resembles Paul Krugman, who similarly writes clearly on complex topics . . . Helps make sense of recent financial history.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Anyone with an interest in politics, monetary policy, or international diplomacy will get a kick out of Piketty’s clear discussion.” —Shelf Awareness
“If you have been influenced by Piketty’s landmark work on inequality, make sure to read this next.” —Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Piketty, a French economist, applies the critique developed in his celebrated Capital in the Twenty-First Century to recent headlines in this punchy collection of essays. The short pieces, written for the newspaper Liberation, cover developments since the 2008 financial collapse: the efforts by the Fed and the European Central Bank (ECB) to stabilize Western banks, the advent of public debt crises in southern Europe, and the 2015 election of Greece's Syriza party. He hammers on several themes: the deepening inequality between workers with stagnating wages and super-rich executives and rentiers, the unfairness of raising taxes on low-income wage-earners while cutting taxes on capital incomes of the rich (Liliane Bettencourt, France's richest woman, is a frequent target for the minuscule tax she pays on her 15 billion fortune), the folly of ECB austerity policies that choke off growth and saddle governments with unpayable debt, and the need for European Union wide budget and tax policies to accompany the common euro currency. Piketty, the French Paul Krugman, has an extraordinary knack for translating the complexities of central bank finance, tax policy, regulation, and macroeconomics into lucid, down-to-earth language enriched by shrewd historical and cultural insights. This is a compelling challenge to economic orthodoxy.
