Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed

by Paul Mason

Overview

Meltdown is the gripping account of the financial collapse that destroyed the West’s investment banks, brought the global economy to its knees, and undermined three decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. Covering the development of the crisis from the economic front line, BBC Newsnight journalist Paul Mason explores the roots of the US and UK’s financial hubris, documenting the real-world causes and consequences from the Ford factory, to Wall Street, to the City of London. In this fully updated new edition, he recounts how the credit crunch became a full-blown financial crisis, and explores its impact on capitalist ideology and politics in our new age of austerity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844676538
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	11/08/2010
Edition description:	New Updated Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Paul Mason is the economics editor of the BBC’s flagship current affairsprogram Newsnight and appears frequently on BBC World News America.He has covered globalization and social justice stories from locations aroundthe world, including Latin America, Africa and China. His book Live Working,Die Fighting was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

1 Midtown Meltdown: The Collapse of Free-Market Capitalism 1

2 Hyperdrive Blitzkrieg: Wall Street Hubris Kills the Bailout, Enrages America 22

3 Financial Krakatoa: From the Banking Explosion to a Volcanic Winter of Recession 37

4 White Shoes: How Deregulation Made the Investment Banks All-Powerful 56

5 Subprime: How the Low-Wage Economy Fuelled High-Risk Finance 81

6 The Big Freeze: The Credit Crunch and the Inflation Spike of 2007-8 99

7 Helping Is Futile: The Life and Death of Neoliberal Ideology 118

8 The Disrupted Wave: On the Eve of Depression or a New Long Upswing" 143

9 The Fatal Stimulus: From Global Slump to Euro Crisis 174

10 The Return of Political Economy: Who Pays for the Crisis" 217

Notes 235

Glossary 249

Index 255

Editorial Reviews

A page-turning account ... Mason is refreshingly clear-eyed—and angry.”—Will Hutton, The Guardian

“Excellent.”—Evening Standard

“What people need is a reliable guide to the financial crisis ... Meltdown is the book they are looking for.”—John Gray, The New Statesman

“A lucid and sharply polemical account.”—Oliver Kamm, The Times [London]

From the Publisher

A lucid and sharply polemical account.

Oliver Kamm - The Times [London]

What people need is a reliable guide to the financial crisis …
Meltdown is the book they are looking for.

John Gray - The New Statesman

A reporter’s eye-view of key events, enlivened by colorful brushstrokes.

Sunday Telegraph

Excellent.

Evening Standard

A page-turning account … Mason is refreshingly clear-eyed—and angry.

Will Hutton - The Guardian

Mason (Live Working or Die Fighting), the economics editor of BBC Newsnight, relies on accessible and pithy language to lay out the time line of the meltdown of the U.S. economy in September 2008 and its global reverberations. He details the root causes, names names with impunity and place the blame squarely on the shoulders of policymakers. He argues that when the law governing debt to capital ratios was quietly changed in 2004, this gave banks carte blanche to do whatever they needed to do to make money. Mason writes, "Had the old capital restrictions been in place, it is unlikely that any of the Wall Street banks could have built up toxic debts on the scale that eventually sank them." With a quick history (and refutation) of neoliberal ideology, he makes his case that we are seeing the closing of an era; the future heralds the end of the old world banking system business model in favor of "low-profit, utility-style banking." This is an instructive and succinct play-by-play of the global crisis, helpful for anyone in finance, economics or even policy. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly