The Gods That Failed
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Review
`a rollicking, acerbic account of the bubble and its collapse'
--Daily Telegraph
`superb timing, trenchant analysis and richly deserved criticism of an Anglo-American political culture' --Irish Times
--Daily Telegraph
`superb timing, trenchant analysis and richly deserved criticism of an Anglo-American political culture' --Irish Times
Review
`I want the next book on non-growth, chaps, and as soon as possible, please'
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The irony of the 2008 banking crash is that despite it being quite possible to name the individuals responsible (there are only a few thousand of them and we know where they all worked), they are all going to get away with it. Why? Becuase the pulic doesn't actually understand the sheer venality of what was going on.
Sure the man in the street is angry, and 'banker' is a dirty word at the moment, but isn't it odd how quickly and smoothly life has reverted to business as usual. This is because the man in the street cannot get his head around credit default swaps, securitised deriviates and all the other smoke amd mirror tricks that these crooks used to conjour money out of thin air. If the man in the street understood all this then the severed heads of the more egregious bankers' would be adorning the southern end of London Bridge.
The Gods That Failed is a guide to greed and forsensically disects the methods by which you - yes you - were ripped off by these people. If you are not feeling angry towards the bankers, you will after reading it, and if you are already feeling angry, it will make you realise that you are nowehere near angry enough.
Read and dissemninate.
Sure the man in the street is angry, and 'banker' is a dirty word at the moment, but isn't it odd how quickly and smoothly life has reverted to business as usual. This is because the man in the street cannot get his head around credit default swaps, securitised deriviates and all the other smoke amd mirror tricks that these crooks used to conjour money out of thin air. If the man in the street understood all this then the severed heads of the more egregious bankers' would be adorning the southern end of London Bridge.
The Gods That Failed is a guide to greed and forsensically disects the methods by which you - yes you - were ripped off by these people. If you are not feeling angry towards the bankers, you will after reading it, and if you are already feeling angry, it will make you realise that you are nowehere near angry enough.
Read and dissemninate.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
When the Economic Editors of the Guardian and Mail on Sunday agree about something we should listen to them, and listen very carefully... This book was printed in 2008. Three years on the world of financial shenanigans continues to play out. This is a book I commend strongly to everyone wanting to understand how we got to where we are and where we need to go from here.
In the fifth book, `Mostly Harmless', of his trilogy, `Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', Douglas Adams puts Arthur Dent on the planet of NowWhat. It is a charmless place. Checking the map Dent sees that the planet looks like the Earth but eventually concludes; `It's the right planet, wrong universe'. The only animal surviving on the planet is the NowWhattian boghog, which is vicious, almost inedible, and which communicates by biting each other (and anything else). Being attacked by a boghog Arthur Dent learns that the only way to deal with them is the beat their brains out, as even when injured they continue to attack.
Elliott and Atkinson are our guides to the NowWhattian boghogs (NWbs) of our planet that have evolved into the new `Gods' of money; merchant bankers, market traders, financial advisers, insurance brokers... who have created for themselves a virtual universe based on trading... er, nothing. In a way all can understand they describe the undergrowth in which our NWbs live, their history and increasing excesses. They recall the comfortable world when bankers operated the `3:6:3' rule: take in money at three per cent, loan it at six per cent and be on the golf course by three p.m.
How that has changed; with Fraction Reserve Banking one pound taken in become 100 pounds available to loan, and the debt this generates can be sliced and traded to earn fees and make more profit using Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs). Keep up at the back; these are just two and the more understandable `financial instruments' our NWbs have created. Essentially an NWb eats good money, takes value from it and excretes 100 times the amount that it has taken in. The clever part comes in selling this waste back to those that fed it the good stuff in the first place, called appropriately, `pump and dump'. Having polluted the world of banking so much that the `toxic waste' began to poison even their opportunity for profit NWbs persuaded governments they were too important to fail; so their profits remained private and their risks that of wider society.
The US government alone has subsidised banks and allied services by 7.5 trillion dollars, (that is $7,500,000,000,000); probably enough to prevent Global Warming and give every person on the planet clean drinking water; but what NWbs ask for they seem to be given.
In their last chapter Elliott and Atkinson set out a framework of regulation and law to control the NWbs. Three years on it is possible to judge how much this has been put into effect and how much we need to keep handy the baseball bat alternative... RCP
In the fifth book, `Mostly Harmless', of his trilogy, `Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', Douglas Adams puts Arthur Dent on the planet of NowWhat. It is a charmless place. Checking the map Dent sees that the planet looks like the Earth but eventually concludes; `It's the right planet, wrong universe'. The only animal surviving on the planet is the NowWhattian boghog, which is vicious, almost inedible, and which communicates by biting each other (and anything else). Being attacked by a boghog Arthur Dent learns that the only way to deal with them is the beat their brains out, as even when injured they continue to attack.
Elliott and Atkinson are our guides to the NowWhattian boghogs (NWbs) of our planet that have evolved into the new `Gods' of money; merchant bankers, market traders, financial advisers, insurance brokers... who have created for themselves a virtual universe based on trading... er, nothing. In a way all can understand they describe the undergrowth in which our NWbs live, their history and increasing excesses. They recall the comfortable world when bankers operated the `3:6:3' rule: take in money at three per cent, loan it at six per cent and be on the golf course by three p.m.
How that has changed; with Fraction Reserve Banking one pound taken in become 100 pounds available to loan, and the debt this generates can be sliced and traded to earn fees and make more profit using Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs). Keep up at the back; these are just two and the more understandable `financial instruments' our NWbs have created. Essentially an NWb eats good money, takes value from it and excretes 100 times the amount that it has taken in. The clever part comes in selling this waste back to those that fed it the good stuff in the first place, called appropriately, `pump and dump'. Having polluted the world of banking so much that the `toxic waste' began to poison even their opportunity for profit NWbs persuaded governments they were too important to fail; so their profits remained private and their risks that of wider society.
The US government alone has subsidised banks and allied services by 7.5 trillion dollars, (that is $7,500,000,000,000); probably enough to prevent Global Warming and give every person on the planet clean drinking water; but what NWbs ask for they seem to be given.
In their last chapter Elliott and Atkinson set out a framework of regulation and law to control the NWbs. Three years on it is possible to judge how much this has been put into effect and how much we need to keep handy the baseball bat alternative... RCP
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
To regulate or not to regulate, that is the dilemma to which there is no clear concensus. In "The Gods That Failed: How The Financial Elite Have Blown Away Our Futures", the authors look at and discuss the financial markets constant and persistent quest for privatisation, markets left to trade at will and to minimum or no restraint whatsoever, all adding up to the financiers idea of bliss namely a completely unregulated 'bear-pit' where as Del Boy would say "He who dares wins". and where hostages are rarely taken.
From Mrs 'Handbag' Thatcher onwards a vast amount of time, resources, largesse, and lobbying time was expended by the financial industry to strip away the rules, regulations and safeguards that were there to protect investors, bit by bit the bridges were lowered signalling the start of an orgy of 'casino' style investment gambling. On and off this largely unregulated and speculative welter of investment mayhem went unchallenged until the Lehman collapse in 2008.
The authors point out that it does not require a degree in anything whatsoever to realise that putting the financial market in an environment of minimal regulation is akin to allowing the disturbed of mind to run the lunatic asylum, and the prisoners to have the keys to the jail. Whilst it is acknowledged that most of those in the financial sector are not all mentally unbalanced or crooks (only some) by allowing an unfettered marketplace to take-over, devoid of proper fiscal, ethical and moral restraints gave the green light to those involved to make risky investments and gambles with other peoples money, pocket vast remuneration packages whether or not the investments were ultimately profitable, and here comes the unpalatable bit, leaving a combination of the investors and tax payer to pick up the bill. Not bad work if you can get it. And there's more to depress the average 'Joe' and that is the errant 'fat cats' couldn't care a dam about being fired when 'the muck hit the fan' because they were not required to give back any part of the vast spoils they had milked from the system and were able to lead the life of Reilly on their 'ill-gotten gains', whilst us 'Joes' either as individuals or collectively as taxpayers picked up the tab - and a colossal one it was, £billions and £billions.
It is said that the place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum but in this instance that unfounded optimism fuelled by lack of regulation and unbridled greed flourished not in the lunatic asylum but in the previously hallowed environment of our most august marbled banking halls and the like.
Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson both very eminent Economics Editors of National newspapers, offer an intriguing and erudite account of this risk-prone, profit-driven economic model, bowling along mainly unregulated and in the hands of and under the control of a bunch of unaccountable, irresponsible, swashbuckling, avaricious and arrogant elite who spearheaded the descent downwards into to one of the worst financial meltdowns in history.
They look at the causes and propose solutions to stop a repeat of this failure in the future and have added a new final chapter that deals with the 2008 Credit Crunch and it's aftermath, that should have been title "We Told You So".
From Mrs 'Handbag' Thatcher onwards a vast amount of time, resources, largesse, and lobbying time was expended by the financial industry to strip away the rules, regulations and safeguards that were there to protect investors, bit by bit the bridges were lowered signalling the start of an orgy of 'casino' style investment gambling. On and off this largely unregulated and speculative welter of investment mayhem went unchallenged until the Lehman collapse in 2008.
The authors point out that it does not require a degree in anything whatsoever to realise that putting the financial market in an environment of minimal regulation is akin to allowing the disturbed of mind to run the lunatic asylum, and the prisoners to have the keys to the jail. Whilst it is acknowledged that most of those in the financial sector are not all mentally unbalanced or crooks (only some) by allowing an unfettered marketplace to take-over, devoid of proper fiscal, ethical and moral restraints gave the green light to those involved to make risky investments and gambles with other peoples money, pocket vast remuneration packages whether or not the investments were ultimately profitable, and here comes the unpalatable bit, leaving a combination of the investors and tax payer to pick up the bill. Not bad work if you can get it. And there's more to depress the average 'Joe' and that is the errant 'fat cats' couldn't care a dam about being fired when 'the muck hit the fan' because they were not required to give back any part of the vast spoils they had milked from the system and were able to lead the life of Reilly on their 'ill-gotten gains', whilst us 'Joes' either as individuals or collectively as taxpayers picked up the tab - and a colossal one it was, £billions and £billions.
It is said that the place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum but in this instance that unfounded optimism fuelled by lack of regulation and unbridled greed flourished not in the lunatic asylum but in the previously hallowed environment of our most august marbled banking halls and the like.
Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson both very eminent Economics Editors of National newspapers, offer an intriguing and erudite account of this risk-prone, profit-driven economic model, bowling along mainly unregulated and in the hands of and under the control of a bunch of unaccountable, irresponsible, swashbuckling, avaricious and arrogant elite who spearheaded the descent downwards into to one of the worst financial meltdowns in history.
They look at the causes and propose solutions to stop a repeat of this failure in the future and have added a new final chapter that deals with the 2008 Credit Crunch and it's aftermath, that should have been title "We Told You So".
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