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When you're young, it's much easier to attach yourself to a single personality as capable of identifying, and struggling against many of the concepts and values you regard as inimical to those you support; but
as one draws closer to "threescore and ten", more and more of the people you looked up to when you were just "learning the ropes", with little exposure to the world of realpolitik turn out to have feet if clay, or at least, display more of the inherent contradictions which dampen the zeal of youth.
Still, it's refreshing to see the concentration of logic and historical research displayed in David Stockman's new work, "The Great Deformation".
You have to be at least forty years of age, or so, to remember Mr. Stockman's "five months of fame"; Stockman was a former divinity student elected to Congress from Michigan in 1976; thrust into the spotlight as a defender of the Reagan administration's economic plans some five years later, Stockman displayed the temerity (and integrity) that there were many features in "Reaganomics' which ran counter to the theories promoted by Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and other economic "conservatives' of that day.
After leaving the spotlight, Stockman worked in investment banking for a number of years and was witness to many of the distortions to a "traditional" economic and monetary standard advocated prior to both the Great Depression and the jettisoning of the Bretton Woods agreements by Richard Nixon on that August weekend in 1971 many of us with a long-standing interest in economics still remember.
The book is refreshingly non partisan; Harry Truman, Bill Clinton and, especially, Dwight Eisenhower draw high praise, while Barack Obama and both Bushes, the latter in particular, find themselves lumped in with Nixon. Roosevelt and Reagan, probably the two most influential Presidents of the past century, draw mixed criticism.
Regrettably, a long and dry read for anyone not somewhat familiar with economics and banking, and subject, as all such works are, to intense criticism on particular points with which few in the audience are likely to be familiar. Still, no other author has, to date, so thoroughly documented the steps, and the ignored warnings which led to the disaster of September, 2008, or the distortions which were peddled to an unprepared public at that time.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 12-29-2013 at 03:18 PM..
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