David Stockman - The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America

 96 kbps, Read by Read by William Hughes, Unabridged, 29 discs, 36h 51m 10s
 
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-great-deformation-david-stockman/1114156816?ean=9781586489120

A New York Times bestseller
The Great Deformation is a searing look at WashingtonΓÇÖs craven response to the recent myriad of financial crises and fiscal cliffs. It counters conventional wisdom with an eighty-year revisionist history of how the American stateΓÇöespecially the Federal ReserveΓÇöhas fallen prey to the politics of crony capitalism and the ideologies of fiscal stimulus, monetary central planning, and financial bailouts. These forces have left the public sector teetering on the edge of political dysfunction and fiscal collapse and have caused AmericaΓÇÖs private enterprise foundation to morph into a speculative casino that swindles the masses and enriches the few.

Defying right- and left-wing boxes, David Stockman provides a catalogue of corrupters and defenders of sound money, fiscal rectitude, and free markets. The former includes Franklin Roosevelt, who fathered crony capitalism; Richard Nixon, who destroyed national financial discipline and the Bretton Woods gold-backed dollar; Fed chairmen Greenspan and Bernanke, who fostered our present scourge of bubble finance and addiction to debt and speculation; George W. Bush, who repudiated fiscal rectitude and ballooned the warfare state via senseless wars; and Barack Obama, who revived failed Keynesian ΓÇ£borrow and spendΓÇ¥ policies that have driven the national debt to perilous heights. By contrast, the book also traces a parade of statesmen who championed balanced budgets and financial market discipline including Carter Glass, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Simon, Paul Volcker, Bill Clinton, and Sheila Bair.

StockmanΓÇÖs analysis skewers Keynesian spenders and GOP tax-cutters alike, showing how they converged to bloat the welfare state, perpetuate the military-industrial complex, and deplete the revenue baseΓÇöeven as the FedΓÇÖs massive money printing allowed politicians to enjoy ΓÇ£deficits without tears.ΓÇ¥ But these policies have also fueled new financial bubbles and favored Wall Street with cheap money and rigged stock and bond markets, while crushing Main Street savers and punishing family budgets with soaring food and energy costs. The Great Deformation explains how we got here and why these warped, crony capitalist policies are an epochal threat to free market prosperity and American political democracy.

Kirkus Reviews
Former Michigan congressman and budget director for the Reagan administration Stockman (The Triumph of Politics: The Inside Story of the Reagan Revolution, 1986) tells "the real story [of]…how the nation's conservative party fostered the great fiscal breakdown now upon the land, and got away with it." The author laments the failure of officials to permit the financial collapse of 2008 to run its course. "Had this attack been allowed," he writes, "hundreds of billions in long-term debt and equity capital that underpinned the Wall Street–based speculation machines would have been wiped out." It also would have "implanted an abiding 1930s style generational lesson about the deadly dangers of leveraged speculation." The author insists that such an outcome would have been "a good thing" as well as "profoundly therapeutic," but Stockman fails to offer convincing refutation of the argument that things would have gotten out of control. He chastises Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others as agents for Wall Street's financial power, but the author's narrow focus on finance does not adequately address the real threat of a plunge into a depression worse than that of the 1930s. However, Stockman performs a real service when he debunks the myths that have been associated with Reagan's conservatism and promotes Eisenhower's fiscal and military conservatism. Two such myths, which provide the framework for this massive work, are specifically highlighted. First is his analysis of "where the Reagan Revolution's fiscal math hit the shoals," leaving a legacy of permanent "massive deficit finance" and the legend that "deficits didn't matter." Second, he traces the roots of perennial deficits back to Roosevelt's decision to take the country off the gold standard in 1933 and Nixon's ending of the dollar-to-gold convertibility in 1971. Stockman forcefully conveys enormous amounts of knowledge, but some assertions will be found to be contentious.

Michael Levin, Huffington Post
ΓÇ£ΓÇÿRequired readingΓÇÖ is an overused term. In fact, proof of reading The Great Deformation should become a requirement for voting. Bring your dog-eared copy to the polls or stay home. The self-confessed smartest guy in the room has written a compelling, intensely readable book that exhumes aspects of economic history that both Democrats and Republicans likely wish would have stayed hidden. The Great Deformation is the book that everyone in Washington, at the White House on both sides of the aisle in Congress, at the Treasury, and in the lobbyists' offices on K Street, fervently prays that you never read.ΓÇ¥

Reuters Breakingviews
ΓÇ£For anyone whose economics are Austrian, and who agrees with Stockman that crony capitalism and corruption have led both fiscal and monetary policies into a cycle of ever-increasing stimulus and ziggurats of debt, ΓÇÿThe Great DeformationΓÇÖ is gloomily persuasive ΓÇô and bodes ill for the future.ΓÇ¥