The Trouble with Money: A Prescription for Americas Financial Fever

by William Greider

Book Overview

A survey of the last decade's most disastrous fiscal fiascos offers answers to why it is getting harder to afford a house, why interest rates stay high despite low inflation, and much more. By the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0962474509
• ISBN13: 9780962474507
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Whittle Direct Books
• Length: 94 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Hobo Philosopher

The Trouble with money is a thin book. It seems to have resulted from a lecture that Mr. Grieder was asked to do for the banking and investment community. As usual it is very good and economically informative. Mr. Greider seems to have the problem nailed. And today we see it all happening over again. This book is well worth reading but SECRETES of the Temple is a much deeper analysis. I know Mr. Greider is not a history writer but I wish he would write a book entirely about the concept of money. Like Galbraith's MONEY FROM WENCE IT CAME AND WHERE IT WENT. I think Mr. Greider could do a bang-up job on this type of work. Books written by Richard Noble - The Hobo Philosopher: "Hobo-ing America: A Workingman's Tour of the U.S.A.." "A Summer with Charlie" "A Little Something: Poetry and Prose" "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother"

Still full of foreboding: things could get worse

There are more than a dozen full-page ads throughout this, showing in pictures the enormous capacity at "1:29 AM, Memphis, Tennessee. Fleet ready for loading at main hub" (p. 9) and other aspects of "the largest all-cargo air fleet in the world" (p. 9) that reinforce the feeling that everybody needs to have lots of money or this country's bankers won't be the only unhappy people in the world. In a *GO JET* world, the final picture, with a caption, "working to meet the needs of business throughout the world," (on the page after 94), might even be uplifting after a text which urges, "People had better start to find their voice for the emerging debate" (p. 94) about regulating our financial institutions again, so this "Larger Agenda Series" text seems like a hardcover magazine with one long article at times. William Greider is still a top reporter on the state of the economy. THE TROUBLE WITH MONEY is mainly about the American economy. Written in 1989, when the dollar was incredibly strong due to high interest rates, which brought in the flood of foreign investments able to finance growing trade deficits and federal deficits by furnishing an increasingly speculative market for debt, banks were failing at record rates. The price of oil was too low for people with huge mortgages to pay their loans in Texas, while manufacturers paying workers American dollars suffered from a decreasing ability to sell their products in the rest of the world. I'm so stuck in 2003 now, only 14 years later, that complaining about anything in this book is like a drunken bat out for blood that dried up a long time ago. But I'm as upset over the current news about any predictions of improvement in the global economy, a constant hope of those who are looking for the next big spurt of growth that would prevent the kind of collapse that I will attempt to provide in a factual analysis of this book, though at this point, the effort is as much psychiatric anamnesis as the entertainment value of the question in the form of an offer: do you want to bet?Every percent of something is different from a percent of something else, and this applies mainly to the U.S. Department of Commerce chart on page 70, "Inflation-Adjusted Interest Rates." With a positive 4.42 percent in the 1980s, Greider thinks "the bloated interest rates of the 1980s were rivaled during only one other period in this century--the Roaring Twenties, when similarly distorted social values were in full play." (p. 71). Those who check the numbers at the bottom of the chart will discover a whopping negative 5.13 percent for the 1940s, showing that lenders had little chance of getting their money back at the same value, as time was changing the situation greatly in favor of those who could use money productively. Today's interest rates might seem small to us, "but, historically, 0.35 percent represents a generous rate of real return on short-term T-bills." (p. 70). These numbers were from "Alan Greenspan, the new Federal Re