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Fixing Global Finance (Forum on Constructive Capitalism)
 
 
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Fixing Global Finance (Forum on Constructive Capitalism) (Hardcover)

by Martin Wolf (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 248 pages
  • Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press (1 Sep 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0801890489
  • ISBN-13: 978-0801890482
  • Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 544,103 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review
`The book [offers] ... an eloquent defense of financial globalization ... It is ... both bold and constructive.' --Harold James, Foreign Affairs, January / February 2009

"...what Wolf ... say[s] repays attention...his book is valuable...in identifying one of the main dimensions of the present crisis."
--Alex Callinicos, International Socialism, Spring 2009 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
"This book is a great and important contribution to everyone's welfare on the globe. It can be paid no higher accolade." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Crisis Not Our Fault - Bankers Say, 31 Mar 2009
This review is from: Fixing Global Finance (Hardcover)
Martin Wolf's submission on the global train wreck is short, written in a readable, journalistic style, and duly supplemented with graphs and tables. While one does need to know the basic terms, an economics degree is not a requisite for reading it. This is all the good that can be said of it.

Fixing Global Finance is a misleading title - possibly intentionally. This is an economic tract sketching the macro background to the financial crisis. Only peripherally does it deal with finance meant as banking or the markets, and the book provides no suggested fix to their problems. Indeed, Wolf would have us believe that the financial crisis has nothing to do with bankers, market supervision, or monetary policy mistakes. It is all the fault of a `savings glut' and disembodied trade flows, or of that little Chinese saver and his over-parsimonious government. That America and Europe's banks paid hundreds of billion (yes, hundreds) in bonuses in the half-decade that preceded their collective failure has nothing to do with their current trouble. That the Fed and the ECB allowed investment banks and markets to dictate monetary policy (a practice known euphemistically as `signalling'), thus engendering the greatest credit bubble in generations, was perfectly all right. That the same public institutions refused to regulate the credit derivatives market, praised opaque securitisations, and encouraged no-equity borrowing on mortgages and corporate buy-outs alike was all blameless.

To be fair, much of Wolf's book seems to have been written in 2007 or early 2008, before the full, horrific scale of the bust was apparent. But one only has to read his more recent editorials in the Financial Times: it is the same story of innocent financiers who must be bailed out with ever greater subsidies, tax cuts, and toxic asset clean-ups. And even Wolf's purely macro-economic view does not hold water. Thanks to the Fed's irresponsible policy of wide open monetary taps, credit growth in the US averaged US$4 trillion per year in the last three years of the boom; this dwarfs reserve accumulation by China of a few hundred billion in total.

If you would like a less superficial, more honest if hard-hitting account of the crisis, I recommend the long article by Simon Johnson (an ex-IMF official) in The Atlantic. This can be found on the Internet (Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, or look for The Atlantic Monthly). It is also more succinct than Wolf's brief yet quite forgettable book.
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4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Superbly informative, but not focussed on current crises., 16 Mar 2009
By Feyd (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fixing Global Finance (Hardcover)
Only Martin Wolf could have written this book.

Imagine a team of scholars working to ensure all the important areas are covered with rigorous accuracy & precision; a top journalist to render their findings in clearly accessible writing; chuck in a leading currency speculator and a few SWF managers to keep it real and finally a wizard to morph the whole team into a single person so the writing is totally coherent and unified. This book really is that good.

However the book isn't about the current crises. There's some reference to the beginnings of the sub prime in 2007 but the work doesn't really get more up to date than that.

Also the book doesn't reflect Wolfs current views. He writes about government intervention doing more harm than good - in contrast to his recent FT columns where he advocates much more robust intervention than we've seen to date - 'shock and awe' as he calls it.

Still the fact that the book was largely written from the neo - liberal perspective doesn't detract from its value at all. Unlike almost everyone else on both sides of the free market / managed economy divide, Wolf doesn't let his point of view get in the way of a clear and objective description of the world as it really is.

Martin describes many of the issues with global finance that a radical might have picked out, at least one writing back in 2007. He's not really prescriptive with his solutions, I think he felt he just needed to show the world the big picture with sufficient clarity, and then actors would themselves see what needs to be done. Which from a free market perspective was for governments in the developing world to encourage stability and set up markets that encourage the types of investment that are least vulnerable to backfiring on the host country due to capital flight when financiers get panicky. And for financiers from Asia , who now control much more wealth than their western counterparts, to stop flooding the US with Capital (as they were back in 07) and instead start investing in their own region not only will benefit their people but should have a better chance of securing them high long term returns.

Anyhow that sort of thinking has been superseded by events, and is only a small part of the book. Whats not redundant is the detailed, lucid description of global finance, supported with generous references to the best available sources for those who want an even deeper understanding of particular features.

Despite the quality of writing , this book may be demanding for the general reader due to the shear density of information it contains. Unlike other recent books it doesn't try to explain in the context of a theory that effectively tells the reader how to think - at least if you ignore the light touch free market leanings. Still if you want to learn about global finance as it really was up until 2008, this is the book you're looking for.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read, 18 Jun 2009
By P. Legrain (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Fixing Global Finance (Hardcover)
Martin Wolf's latest book is like his columns in the FT: short, punchy and rigorous. His perceptive insight and clear analysis explain why the imbalances in the global economy are unsustainable, how they have helped sow the seeds for the current financial crisis, and how the global economic and financial system should be reformed. It's a great book. The only pity is that it was written before the current financial crisis took hold, but it is a must-read all the same.
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