Across generations, the playbook is seventy-five years old:
Mike Konczal reviewed Jeff Madrick’s latest book, Age of Greed, for The Nation.
Like a lot of recent historical work, the book puts the 1970s front and center as the decade when everything changed. The runaway inflation of the 1970s, a course set in by the expansive monetary policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns and the price controls imposed by the Nixon administration to keep the economy running in high gear through Richard Nixon’s second term, forced further deregulation of the financial sector. When the financial sector approached a collapse, a collapse stopped by emergency Federal Reserve intervention, further deregulation was used to return the sector to profitability.
It’s not like we didn’t know it was happening:
Though the main story in Age of Greed is how an elite group was able to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of an out-of-control financial system, there’s another story in the background that could lead us somewhere. Most of the people we meet were thinking of the long-term when it came to changing the world to be closer to their free market image they had in mind. Many of the original architects of the demise of Roosevelt-era financial reforms were anti-New Dealers who thought of their project as a generational shift. Will the battle against the increased financialization of the economy look the same way? Will the battle require thinking in terms of decades, and have to be fought in all parts of the economy? If history is any guide, that might be the only way to get to an economy that works for all of us.
More here.
