Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy
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Product Description
An incisive look at the global economic crisis, our flawed response, and the implications for the world’s future prosperity. The Great Recession, as it has come to be called, has impacted more people worldwide than any crisis since the Great Depression. Flawed government policy and unscrupulous personal and corporate behavior in the United States created the current financial meltdown, which was exported across the globe with devastating conseque… More >>
Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy
February 6th, 2010 at 8:03 am
How many socialist books, intellectuals, and politicians are we going to have to hear utter the big lie, that has become the narrative today? Free markets failed and thus we need to make them less free (btw, the opposite of free is still slave).
They pretend we’ve had a free market, we have not.
They pretend that the massive intrusions of government coercion didn’t cause a fair amount of our problems, they did (notice I don’t argue they caused all of our problems like the sophists on the other side).
Wow.
We have not had a free market in the USA, not close, and the unfree parts caused a large part of our woes.
So let’s enslave people more.
Apparently they give out nobel prizes for this crap (Krugman are you listening?).
The whole book NEVER honestly addresses the failures of government. Wow. You see, if he had, his lying thesis would be shot.
This narrative is actually winning.
What a joke.
Rating: 1 / 5
February 6th, 2010 at 10:53 am
Talk about putting it all out there. This book does that and more! It’s unfortunate this book wasn’t written before said events, but there was a book which was published in January, 2008 (What Greenspan Can’t Tell You) which laid out why we were on the precipice and what was about to occur. You may want to give it a read for what is to come next. Rating: 5 / 5
February 6th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
I admit that economics confuses me, so when I read a book written in lucid easy to understand language I can begin to understand a compound-complex idea a little more clearly. Nothing in economics is as it seems because politics can often obfuscate with ideological explanations that are neither simple or even partially true when based on politics. Stiglitz doesn’t say that the free market can’t work, but that it isn’t the entire answer. Regulations, as the banking meltdown of 2009 demonstrates, are necessary to prevent greed from becoming the dominating motivation for Wall Street and big banks, especially investment banks that measure success only in terms of how big their next bonus will be.
“Freefall” doesn’t give us all the answers, and again I admit that I still have questions, but for a basic understanding of the markets as they played out in the past couple of years and how deregulation merely increased the problems for most of Main sreet this is a very good place to start. Some critics have already panned this book as a call to socialism, but those critics obviously lack even a basic understanding of what socialism really is and are only looking for a buzz word to sustain the belief that a totally “Free Market” system is the only good thing, when in fact it increases the chances of boom and bust cycles coming even closer together in the future. To begin, modest regulations are all that might be needed, and if bankers once again act trustworthy and preform ethically it could be enough. If greed continues unabated, then the middle class will disappear and only the wealthiest will profit. Rating: 5 / 5
February 6th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Freefall is a fantastic overview of the crisis from both the multitude of causes to the social fabric that created the backdrop. Stiglitz in a fairly concise book, manages to discuss a lot of issues with a lot of clarity. It describes incentive misalignment, the abuse of barganing power by those who had it during the crisis under asymmetric informaiton, the failure of prices to reflect true costs, the abundance of negative externalities and market failures that inherintly exist and even the degredation of our social contract in promoting general well being. The book is not written in two parts but the contents of the book are sort of split into two categories.
The first part of the book is really a description of the causes of the crisis. It describes some of the specific actions taken by bankers, the incentives to take fees irrespective of the value add of the underlying contracts, and how that evolved into model “arbitrage” abuse in mortgage repackaging. It discusses the change in the distribution of wealth in the country and the stagnation of wages for most of the country despite general GDP growth that hides that fact, in particular the transfer of wealth from “main street to wall street”. It discusses the failure of central bankers to address the bubbles of the economy and how their economic principles were too often based on faulty neo-classical principles. It then goes into how the crisis was used as an opportunity to hold the taxpayer “hostage” in the same way that one can price gouge a pedestrian for a ride in a hurricane. This part of the book prepares the unfamiliar reader with the much needed backdrop to understand most of the crisis.
The second part of the book starts off where the current events end and tries to set the scene for the steps we need to take for the future. This was the best part of the book for me. Stiglitz outlines many of the important principles that are violated in the neo-classical world that makes it apparant, desire for incremental benefit does not imply an aggregate improvement for the economy. Stiglitz makes a strong effort to show market failures are rife, the cost of a crisis as an example far exceeded the profit generated by fees, and as a result leaning on the market is better than regulators for solutions clearly needs to be re-thought. It is hard to disagree… Stiglitz also discusses less in depthly but importantly nonetheless, the ecological economic principles that we are missing today- in particular the true “cost” of consumption as a tax on the future with resource scarcity as well as environmental damage. I dont think these are particularly contentious but they are often forgotten. ASpect of behavioural finance are brought up and the cognitive dissonance of financiers responses are described. Stiglitz ends with a call to action society at large to take the recent failure as an opportunity to ammend our social contracts and revitalize our trust and institutional arrangements. The need for better regulation he believes is truly clear and the recent crisis needs to be taken as a reason to fundamentally change the way our economy is structured, from capital/labour distribution to consumption investment balance (investment in both fixed assets as well as human capital).
This book is so far one of the most insightful I have read. I agree with a lot of the commentary but let me quickly go into why I dont think its quite five stars. The author is often a bit unbalanced in the criticism, of both central bankers as well as those in finance. Most of the book goes on about the almost inherent total disregard for any other people interest by the bankers involved, but then later it contextualises their actions and describes their actions as a function of their environment and incentive set, making them more a time and place than the bad people they are painted as elsewhere. Central bankers too are berated, but they arent incentivised by the pay. Hindsight is 20/20 and although some were very impressive with their foresight of the problems, it is hard to uniformly make out as though central bankers are all fools. The end goal of this book is to try to argue for a change in social architecture and institutional arrangement, as currently incentives are misaligned, the markets fail, and we deal with things after rather than pre-emptively. If this is the goal then this book should have been written inclusively for all readers. I find it quite exclusionary for most in finance and many in politics. That is not that sensible given the goal is to convince. That being said, some scolding is in order, but the magnitude and the one-sidedness is a bit frustrating, predatory lending was a real phenomenon, but assuming away the responsibility by the many individuals speculating on property is not a fair evaluation. All in all the economics of the crisis are evaluated excellently, the conclusions can be debated, but in my opinion they are extremely valuable and provide an important framework to consider for the future. Alot is accomplished in this book and most of it is convincingly argued, this book is a very valuable addition to our recent crises’s literature. Rating: 4 / 5
February 6th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Professor Stiglitz has repeatedly spoken truth to power. He wrote about the perils of unchecked globalization, the disaster of the Federal Reserves policies in the 90s and 00s, the wrong-footed solutions to the Asia crisis, and the cost of the Iraq War. Here he lays out in simple, straightforward jargon-free language, what happened to cause the worst economic crisis since the Depression and what steps we need to take to prevent it from happening again. Highly recommended. Rating: 5 / 5