by Anastasia Nesvetailova (Author), Ronen Palan (Author)
I don't like the word
'sabotage',"--a former Goldman Sachs trader admitted. "It's just
harsh.... Though, frankly, how else do you make money in this
business...I mean, real money."
The fundamental motive
for financial innovation is not to make the system work better, but to
avoid regulation and oversight. This is not a bug of the financial
system, but a built-in feature. The president of the US is not a tax
avoider because he is an especially fraudulent financier; he's a tax
avoider because he is a wealthy man in a system premised on such deceit.
Finance is an industry of sabotage.
This book is a brilliant,
intellectual detective story that traces the origins of financial
sabotage, starting with the work of a prescient American economist who
saw the capacity for banks and businesses to dissemble and profit as
early as the 1920s. What was accomplished modestly in the first half of
the 20th century became a booming global industry in the 1980s.
Financialization took over everything, culminating in instruments so
complex and confusing their own creators were being destroyed by them in
2008.
With each financial bust, people expect to hear who the
culprit was, and cynically know to not expect much punishment to ever
reach them. But the innovation of this book is to show that each
individual gaming the system isn't a crook---the whole system is
sabotage.
