The 2008 recession left the United States in deep trouble. With unemployment levels approaching 25 million and banks sustained by trillions of government dollars, are governments and economists understanding the crisis correctly?Examining US economic history, Jack Rasmus reveals how the 2008 global financial crisis is an 'epic recession'. This 'epic recession' is neither a full-blown depression nor a short-lived period of economic contraction, followed by a swift return to growth, ...

Radical economist Jack Rasmus shows how the Obama administration failed to deliver on its promises of economic recovery and social justice and puts forward alternative proposals for how the administration could have realised these goals.In the period of Obama’s presidency, corporate profits were up, and economic hardship was the bitter reality for millions of US citizens. Rasmus argues that the weakest economic recovery since 1947 was the direct result of the Obama administration's...

The US in 1913 was one of the last major economies to establish an institution of a central bank. The book examines, however, the history and evolution of central banking in the US from the perspective of central banking functions—i.e. aggregator of private lending to the federal government, fiscal agent for the government, regulator of money supply, monopoly over currency issuance, banking system supervision, and lender of last resort. The evolution of central banking functions is traced ...

An historically unprecedented state subsidization of the US financial system has been implemented since 2010 via the Federal Reserve, the US central bank. Oiginally designed to serve as lender of last resort during banking crises, central banking globally has been transformed into the subsidization of the private banking system. Today that system is addicted to, and increasingly dependent on, continuing central bank infusions of significant amounts of liquidity. Rescinding this artificial sub...

Looting Greece examines how and why the Syriza party, which took power in January 2015 promising to end austerity, and return Greece to economic growth, ended up agreeing to a deal much worse than its political predecessors in 2010 and 2012. Placing the Greek events of 2015 in broader historical perspective, Rasmus argues a radical new neoliberal initiative in Europe has emerged. In the 2015 debt deal the Troika will now directly manage Greece’s economy?running its banks, writing Greece’s bud...

"Rasmus excels at economic history... The Scourge is a powerful, important book. We ignore it at our peril." David Baker, Zmag While the capitalist system has undergone numerous restructurings throughout its history, the capitalist elites’ purpose in elaborating these changes has remained the same: to restore and/or extend their hegemony over domestic class and global challengers. The current systemic designation, operative since 1978, is “neoliberalism,” deployed to obfuscate what in actu...

Just as contemporary economics failed to predict the 2008-09 crash, and over-estimated the subsequent brief recovery that followed, economists today are again failing to accurately forecast the slowing global economic growth, the growing fragility, and therefore rising instability in the global economy. This book offers a new approach to explaining why mainstream economic analyses have repeatedly failed and why fiscal and monetary policies have been incapable of producing a sustained recov...

Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country’s top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens of millions of people. He quashes dire warnings of looming rampant inflation and spiraling debt with solid historic evidence to the contrary—evidenc...

A penetrating critique tracing how under-regulated trading between European and U.S. banks led to the 2008 financial crisis—with a prescription for preventing another meltdownThere have been numerous books examining the 2008 financial crisis from either a U.S. or European perspective. Tamim Bayoumi is the first to explain how the Euro crisis and U.S. housing crash were, in fact, parasitically intertwined. Starting in the 1980s, Bayoumi outlines the cu...

Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz explains the current financial crisis—and the coming global economic order.The current global financial crisis carries a “made-in-America” label. In this forthright and incisive book, Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz explains how America exported bad economics, bad policies, and bad behavior to the rest of the world, only to cobble together a haphazard and ineffective response when the markets finally seized up. Drawing on his academic experti...

HOW TO MAKE DEBT WORK FOR USWhen we talk about debt and its impact on our economy, we almost always mean 'government debt'. However, this is only a small part of the picture: individuals, private firms and households owe trillions, and these private debts are vital to understanding the economy.In The Paradox of Debt, Richard Vague shows that the real factor that drives both financial crises and spiralling inequality – but also, paradoxically, economic growth – is e...

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