The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity–and What We Can Do about It

Les Leopold

Chelsea Green Publishing, Jun 2, 2009 - Business & Economics - 240 pages

How could the best and brightest (and most highly paid) in finance crash the global economy and then get us to bail them out as well? What caused this mess in the first place? Housing? Greed? Dumb politicians? What can Main Street do about it?

In The Looting of America, Leopold debunks the prevailing media myths that blame low-income home buyers who got in over their heads, people who ran up too much credit-card debt, and government interference with free markets. Instead, readers will discover how Wall Street undermined itself and the rest of the economy by playing and losing at a highly lucrative and dangerous game of fantasy finance.

He also asks some tough questions:

• Why did Americans let the gap between workers' wages and executive compensation grow so large?
• Why did we fail to realize that the excess money in those executives' pockets was fueling casino-style investment schemes?
• Why did we buy the notion that too-good-to-be-true financial products that no one could even understand would somehow form the backbone of America's new, postindustrial economy?
• How do we make sure we never give our wages away to gamblers again?
• And what can we do to get our money back?

In this page-turning narrative (no background in finance required) Leopold tells the story of how we fell victim to Wall Street's exotic financial products. Readers learn how even school districts were taken in by "innovative" products like collateralized debt obligations, better known as CDOs, and how they sucked trillions of dollars from the global economy when they failed. They'll also learn what average Americans can do to ensure that fantasy finance never rules our economy again.

As the country teeters on the brink of what could be the next Great Depression, we should be especially wary of the so-called financial experts who got us here, and then conveniently got themselves out. So far, it appears they've won the battle, but The Looting of America refuses to let them write the history--or plan its aftermath.

Contents

• The Hooking of Whitefish: 1
• eight: 29
• four: 33
• Learning and Unlearning the Lessons of the Great Depression: 39
• nine: 42
• The End of Fantasy Finance?: 134
• eleven: 165
• Glossary: 191
• 199: 199
• Index: 208

About the author

After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (MPA 1975), Les co-founded the Labor Institute (1976), a non-profit organization that designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment and economics for unions, worker centers and community organizations. In addition to his current book, he is the author of How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Financial Elites Get Away with Siphoning off America's Wealth (John Wiley and Sons, 2013); The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009);and The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi, (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2006), which won the Independent Publisher Award for best biography. As an expert in economic popular education methods and practices, he is currently helping to build a national runawayinequality.org national education network linking together unions, community groups and faith-based organizations. The network training hundreds of lay trainers to conduct “Reversing Runaway Inequality” workshops throughout the country. All royalties from his current book go back into this campaign.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity–and What We Can Do about It
• Author: Les Leopold
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009
• ISBN: 1603582223, 9781603582223
• Length: 240 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Economic Conditions; Business & Economics / Finance / General; Political Science / Political Economy