A financial policy horror story

Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism

By Kevin Phillips

Viking. 240 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Tim Rutten

Kevin Phillips' new book

would be sobering enough if it were the first we had heard from him. When you take into account how often he's been right, this 14th volume in his continuing commentary on the American condition becomes positively alarming.

As a senior strategist for Richard M. Nixon in 1968, Phillips correctly forecast the coming conservative realignment that would propel Ronald Reagan into the White House. As a principal architect of the Republicans' "Southern strategy," he foresaw a shift of influence to the "Sunbelt" and to the "new right" - two phrases he coined. He also envisioned what we call the red state-blue state divide and accurately predicted its geography. Twenty-five years ago, the Wall Street Journal heralded Phillips as "the leading conservative electoral analyst," but since then, he's become disenchanted with the GOP's embrace of evangelical pieties and what he calls dynastic politics and "market triumphalism."

Still, he hasn't crossed the aisle, and in

Bad Money

, he has a great deal to say about the complicity of the Democrats - particularly Clinton Democrats - in the developing global economic crisis.

In part, this latest book is meant as a rhetorical shot across the bow of the current presidential campaign, which Phillips convincingly argues is failing to address the causes and implications of our current distress. There's plenty of that to go around: The economic expansion that occurred during George W. Bush's administration was the first to exclude the middle class. Previous booms had left the poor behind, but this one was the first to benefit only the rich. Median family income is still less than it was in 1999, which makes this the longest slump ever measured in that key indicator of middle-class well-being. The Clinton boom was no great shakes for the great middle, either: Since 1983, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, "the median net worth of upper-income families more than doubled, while the median net worth of middle-income families grew by just 29 percent."

Yet, for a variety of reasons, including Bill and Hillary Clinton's close and quite obviously mutually beneficial relationship with Wall Street, Phillips doesn't hold out much hope that either party is willing to address the roots of the economic crisis. The GOP's faith in markets is absolute, and the religious right's blind embrace of capitalism has eliminated populist dissent from the party's internal debate. The Democrats, meanwhile, are irreparably compromised by contributions from the Wall Street bankers and hedge-fund managers who are at the center of the current global meltdown.

Phillips locates that malaise in two structural factors: Over the last three decades, financial services have expanded from 11 percent of America's gross domestic product to a record 21 percent, while manufacturing has declined from 25 percent to 13 percent. The author rejects the notion that this shift simply reflects a healthy adaptation to a "post-industrial" economy. Instead, he argues that the emergence of hedge funds and ever-more exotic bundles of financial derivatives amounts to a "financialization" of the American economy that has facilitated a ruinous expansion of private, as well as public, debt. Failed energy policy - or, rather, the avoidance of any energy policy - has made the United States vulnerable to what might be the coming peak in oil production, thereby further weakening the dollar, which is essentially backed by the global petroleum economy.

"My summation," Phillips writes, "is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation's history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence."

That much of

Bad Money

feels ripped from this morning's headlines adds to the book's sense of relevance. It also gives stretches of Phillips' argument a rather rushed, uncharacteristically first-draft quality. Derivative finance and the dynamics of hedge-fund operation are complex matters in any case, and a bit more of the author's time might have produced more of the lucid economic explanation for which he's rightly known. One also wishes for more of the real-world, "insider" financial and political anecdotes that are more liberally sprinkled throughout many of his earlier books.

Because he knows the territory in a deep and reflective way, Phillips has a keen eye for the relevant historical quotation. America's recent economic folly, for example, is neatly summarized in a remark that Joseph Chamberlain, then the British colonial secretary, made in 1904 to a smug group of his country's financiers: "Granted that you are the clearinghouse of the world, [but] are you entirely beyond anxiety as to the permanence of your great position? . . . Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth."