Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics And The Global Crisis Of American Capitalism

'... it’s a safe bet that something has gone terribly wrong … Phillips’ warnings have to be taken seriously.' (The New York Times )

'Kevin Phillips’ new book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, would be sobering enough if it were the first we’d ever heard from him. When you take into account how often he’s been right in the past, this 14th volume in his continuing commentary on the American condition becomes positively alarming … The fact that much of Bad Money feels ripped from this morning’s headlines adds to the book’s sense of urgent relevance.' (The Los Angeles Times)

'... schematically clear yet complex … What sets Bad Money apart from a stack of recent books on these topics is its emphasis on the symbiotic relationship between politicians and big money.' (Bloomberg.com)

In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips warned us of the perilous interaction of debt, financial recklessness, and the increasing cost of scarce oil. The current housing and mortgage debacle is proof once more of Phillips’s prescience, and only the first harbinger of a national crisis. In Bad Money, Phillips describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of American domination of world markets. America’s current challenges (and failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world economic powers—especially the Dutch and British. Global overreach, worn-out politics, excessive debt, and exhausted energy regimes are all chilling signals that the United States is crumbling as the world superpower.

‘Bad money’ refers to a new phenomenon in wayward megafinance — the emergence of a U.S. economy that is globally dependent and dominated by hubris-driven financial services. Also ‘bad’ are the risk miscalculations and strategic abuses of new multitrillion-dollar products such as asset-backed securities and the lure of buccaneering vehicles like hedge funds. Finally, the U.S. dollar has been turned into bad money as it has weakened and become vulnerable to the world’s other currencies. In all these ways, ‘bad’ finance has failed the American people and pointed U.S. capitalism toward a global crisis. Bad Money is the perfect follow-up to Phillips’s last book, whose dire warnings are now proving frighteningly accurate.

'Bad Money by Kevin Phillips avoids the wild predictions of mass economic destruction, instead giving thoughtful, if alarming, histories and analyses of how we got into the mess we’re in today.' (Bloomberg News)

'His book provides a primer in economics, detailed but not dull, accessible to the uninitiated, and useful to the already well-informed.' (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)