Product Description

The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 is the most alarming of our lifetime because of the warp-speed at which it is occurring. How could it have happened, especially after all that we’ve learned from the Great Depression? Why wasn’t it anticipated so that remedial steps could be taken to avoid or mitigate it? What can be done to reverse a slide into a full-blown depression? Why have the responses to date of the government and the economics profession been so lackluster? Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it. No previous acquaintance on the part of the reader with macroeconomics or the theory of finance is presupposed. This is a book for intelligent generalists that will interest specialists as well.

Among the facts and causes Posner identifies are: excess savings flowing in from Asia and the reckless lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board; the relation between executive compensation, short-term profit goals, and risky lending; the housing bubble fuelled by low interest rates, aggressive mortgage marketing, and loose regulations; the low savings rate of American people; and the highly leveraged balance sheets of large financial institutions.

Posner analyzes the two basic remedial approaches to the crisis, which correspond to the two theories of the cause of the Great Depression: the monetarist—that the Federal Reserve Board allowed the money supply to shrink, thus failing to prevent a disastrous deflation—and the Keynesian—that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920’s, a stock-market crash, and the ensuing downward spiral in economic activity. Posner concludes that the pendulum swung too far and that our financial markets need to be more heavily regulated.

Read Richard Posner's blog, and his latest article in The Atlantic. (20090501)

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8208 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780674035140
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Posner (How Judges Think) is uncharacteristically dry in this dense book that states flatly that we are in a recession only because we are too frightened to call it a depression. He makes a near-heroic attempt to delve into the roots of the current crisis, citing some of the harder questions: how did it happen? why was it not anticipated? how is the government responding? A great deal of ground is covered, and the book takes the form of a high-altitude survey, assessing all the major points without getting bogged down in detail. Quickie explanations of subprime mortgages and the credit crunch orient the reader, and Posner addresses the takeaway lessons about capitalism and government, the puzzling lack of foresight from the economist community, the apportioning of blame and the resulting future of conservatism. All good topics, thoroughly and thoughtfully presented, but much of Posner's material is already woefully out of date. This book will make a serviceable study of the current crisis, but it does not serve its intended audience well in the meantime. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Lively, readable, and plainspoken...Posner has an extraordinarily sharp mind.
--Robert M. Solow (New York Review of Books 20090503)

Posner has managed to write a compelling book on the crash...The book has numerous worthwhile insights, including a surprisingly Keynesian analysis of the dynamics of depressions.
--Robert Kuttner (American Prospect 20090505)

A surprising volume that explains what happened to the banking system and economy in terms the lay reader can easily understand...[Posner's] critique is bracing, all the more so because it comes from a right-leaning thinker normally hostile to the ministrations of government bureaucrats.
--Paul M. Barrett (Washington Post Book World 20090517)

Before seeking political asylum in free-market Hong Kong, consider reading a new book that critiques what went wrong with capitalism, written in order to save it. Judge Richard Posner's A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression is noteworthy. As a longtime University of Chicago professor and father of the free-market-based law-and-economics movement, Judge Posner makes an unlikely critic of capitalism. But as author of some 40 books and as the most frequently cited federal appeals court jurist, he is also one of our most original and clearheaded thinkers.
--L. Gordon Crovitz (Wall Street Journal 20090601)

It comes as something of a surprise that Posner, a doyen of the market-oriented law-and-economics movement, should deliver a roundhouse punch to the proposition that markets are self-correcting. It might also seem odd that a federal appellate judge (and University of Chicago law lecturer) would be among the first out of the gate with a comprehensive book on the financial crisis--if, that is, the judge were any other judge. But Posner is the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's successor as the country's most omnivorous and independent-minded public intellectual. By now, his dozens of books just about fill their own wing in the Library of Congress...Compact and bracingly lucid...By the last page, not a single lazy generalization has survived Posner's merciless scrutiny, not one populist cliché remains standing. A Failure of Capitalism clears away whole forests of cant but leaves readers at a loss as to where to go from here. In other words, it is only a starting point--but an indispensable one.
--Jonathan Rauch (New York Times Book Review 20090619)

[Posner] has the rare kind of mind that is a pure pleasure to watch in action, regardless of the subject and the argument being made.
--John Lanchester (New Yorker 20090731)

Richard Posner is one of America's most prominent and prolific public intellectuals...With his concise, jargon-free analysis of the current economic crisis, Posner has cast his lot with those who believe that the "depression" (given the steep reduction in consumption, credit and production, the term, he insists, is appropriate) was the result "not of intrusive, heavy-handed regulation of housing and finance, but of deregulation, hostility to taxation and to government in general."
--Glenn C. Altschuler (Jerusalem Post 20090701)

Richard Posner is a phenomenon...He provides a very competent account of the events which led to the current crisis, with an emphasis on the political and ideological context.
--John Kay (Financial Times )

[Posner] is the quintessential U.S. economic-conservative intellectual...So an excoriating attack by Posner on modern financial market practices is news. A Failure of Capitalism is precisely that. There are still U.S. conservatives who think the crisis was overdone, that the policy response has been too great, that this was merely a crisis of confidence and liquidity, and that the banking system was not insolvent, merely illiquid. That is not Posner's view. His judgment is that the banking system is insolvent and the crisis that took place in 2008 transformed a recession in the US into a depression...In his preface, Posner emphasizes that he has written the book in medias res, a lawyer's way of saying "in the thick of it," with the implication that he has yet fully to make up his mind. He has, however, offered a thought-provoking interim analysis of what went wrong.
--Warwick Lightfoot (Financial World )

About the Author
Richard A. Posner is Circuit Judge, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

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Customer Reviews

Judge Posner takes on the "Depression"
This is the fifth book by Richard Posner (law professor at the University of Chicago and a long-time judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals) that I've read, in addition to many legal opinions. There is no question that he's brilliant and an excellent, clear, and precise writer. There is also no question about his credentials as a libertarian-leaning conservative.

Until now, that is. "A Failure of Capitalism" departs consciously from the prevailing libertarian take on the current recession (or, as Judge Posner argues it should be called, "depression"). In short, he believes that the depression was not mainly caused by government meddling. Rather, it is a "market failure" -- i.e., a crisis that market forces alone could not have prevented. And, given the size of this market failure, government should instead have used regulations to prevent it.

Before I got the book, I had read some indications that Judge Posner was taking this line. But in the book itself, he is crystal clear about his view that deregulation in the financial industry was a major culprit, and his recognition that he is going against the conventional wisdom of both libertarians and conservatives.

The book is well argued and much more thorough than I can convey here. One of the great things about Judge Posner's style is that he anticipates all of the reader's objections and tries to address them in good faith. Whether you agree or disagree, he is always worth reading.

The book also includes a narrative of how the depression developed, descriptions of the systemic problems in the financial industry that made the depression possible, and recommendations for government action.

Although the material may be a little difficult for those with no knowledge of finance, it has been intentionally written with non-specialists in mind. As always, Judge Posner repays the attentive reader.

We're All Guilty, Some Much More Than Others!
Judge Posner was appointed to a Federal Appeals Court position by President Reagan, and has sometimes also been mentioned as a Supreme Court candidate. During his legal career he has pioneered the inclusion of economic perspectives in interpreting law and now regularly writes a blog on economics. In "A Failure of Capitalism" he focuses his combined talents on our current economic downturn, and reaches a surprising (for a conservative, "Chicago-school" proponent) verdict. Those most guilty of contributing to the downturn are Alan Greenspan and George W. Bush - Greenspan for keeping interest rates low, fueling the surge in home prices, and Bush for accelerating deregulation of financial markets and then doing little while the economy began crumbling. (Posner also includes the monies China invested in T-bills as a factor holding American interest rates low.)

At the same time, home buyers and their willing enabler mortgage brokers knew they were getting in over their heads. Wall Street, seeing a great opportunity, then leveraged these new mortgages to extreme levels. Thus, both mortgage-takers and Wall Street were in over their heads. (Posner believes home-buyers' failure to save was part of the problem - reality, however, is that they thought they were saving big time through home appreciation.)

Posner's Prescription: More EFFECTIVE government regulation, not just expanding the hodge-podge of overlapping partial management spread over myriad state and federal agencies. This should include limits on leverage, changing how credit-rating agencies operate and are compensated, requiring CDS be fully collateralized, limiting payday loans, etc. Posner also worries about the impact of enormous bailout monies on the value of our currency.

Why the title "A Failure of Capitalism?" Posner recognizes that competition carries the seeds of capitalism's destruction - bankers, etc. realize that if they don't participate in whatever current fad is popular, they risk becoming unemployed and their firm bought out by others who ride the fad to higher P/E multiples. That's why government regulation is essential.

Posner also believes that the free market is incapable of appropriately setting executive salaries and mutual (and hedge) fund fees due to the inherent biases and conflicts of interest involved. Finally, Posner also points out that current conservative thinking on this subject is vacuous.

Not quite classic Dick
I love reading Posner for the same reason I love reading Nietzsche - he's bold, witty, bitterly funny, and sincere - even when sincerity is a bit irresponsible. When Posner's in prime form, he's willing to think dangerous thoughts in his search for a working version of "the truth." But this book has little of his trademark edgeiness.

More importantly, Posner has aimed this book at the layperson...and missed. Even though he has tried "assiduously to suppress the extraneous," he presumes a post-grad readership with a large and specialized vocabulary. One wonders, with amusement, when Posner last spoke to a "layperson" (and whether that person was a circuit-level judicial clerk).

He does a very good job of explaining the economic mechanisms involved in recent events, and if you're looking for that you'll do no better than this book. But, in my view, the Posner "brand" stands for fearless, airtight polemics - the kind of thing that makes you think "that can't possibly be right" and then spend the next 6 months thinking about it. When he lobs a couple of grenades at his own team (e.g. attributing the crisis to market failure, criticizing executive compensation) there is a glimmer of the classic Dick. But for the most part this is a dry, neutral primer on the economics of depression.

Which is not to say it's bad. It's excellent, in the way that some of the spicier textbooks are excellent. It's reliable and has little of the rushed-to-market sloppiness that characterizes contemporary law-and-econ (Cass Sunstein). As a Fed-junkie, I was bored by it, but I'm giving it to my friends and family members.