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    The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry
    Unavailable
    The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry
    Unavailable
    The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry
    Ebook762 pages11 hours

    The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry

    By Lawrence E. Mitchell

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    American companies once focused exclusively on providing the best products and services. But today, most corporations are obsessed with maximizing their stock prices, resulting in short-term thinking and the kind of cook-the-books corruption seen in the Enron and WorldCom scandals. How did this happen?

    In this groundbreaking book, Lawrence E. Mitchell traces the origins of the problem to the first decade of the 20th century, when industrialists and bankers began merging existing companies into huge “combines”—today’s giant corporations—so they could profit by manufacturing and selling stock in these new entities. He describes and analyzes the legal changes that made this possible, the federal regulatory efforts that missed the significance of this transforming development, and the changes in American society and culture that led more and more Americans to enter the market, turning from relatively safe bonds to riskier common stock in the hopes of becoming rich. Financiers and the corporations they controlled encouraged this trend, but as stock ownership expanded and businesses were increasingly forced to cater to stockholders’ “get rich quick” expectations, a subtle but revolutionary shift in the nature of the American economy occurred: finance no longer served industry; instead, industry began to serve finance.

    The Speculation Economy analyzes the history behind the opening of this economic Pandora’s box, the root cause of so many modern acts of corporate malfeasance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
    Release dateNov 17, 2008
    ISBN9781609944483
    Unavailable
    The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This valuable work is the fruit of enormous in-depth research. Occasionally it succumbs to the forest-and-trees problem, as is perhaps inevitable given the lack of a strong interpretive perspective. Though Mitchell presents abundant evidence supporting the view that the triumph of finance was a response to the stagnation and overaccumulation characteristic of monopoly capital pursuing surplus profit, he never acknowledges the existence of this school of thought and excludes its research from his bibliography. Veblen is the most radical thinker treated. Mitchell also ignores the problem of growing inequality of wealth and income in American society. His conclusion—that “we can alter [the economy]”—contradicts his use elsewhere of the term “plutocracy” and doesn't accord very well with the story he tells, in which efforts to restrain corporations are frustrated again and again.
    • 1/5
      I bought this book through Amazon advertised as ”hardcover” expecting it to be bound – it is not. It is rather single sheets glued to the spine as in a pocket book. I also expected it to be about the “speculation economy,” as this is what the title promises - it is not. It is rather - as I see it - about early American socialists ("progressives") and how they lost the battle for America.