Why Save the Bankers?

March 21, 2016
Piketty, a French economist, applies the critique developed in his celebrated Capital in the Twenty-First Century to recent headlines in this punchy collection of essays. The short pieces, written for the newspaper Liberation, cover developments since the 2008 financial collapse: the efforts by the Fed and the European Central Bank (ECB) to stabilize Western banks, the advent of public debt crises in southern Europe, and the 2015 election of Greece's Syriza party. He hammers on several themes: the deepening inequality between workers with stagnating wages and super-rich executives and rentiers, the unfairness of raising taxes on low-income wage-earners while cutting taxes on capital incomes of the rich (Liliane Bettencourt, France's richest woman, is a frequent target for the minuscule tax she pays on her â¬15 billion fortune), the folly of ECB austerity policies that choke off growth and saddle governments with unpayable debt, and the need for European Unionâwide budget and tax policies to accompany the common euro currency. Piketty, the French Paul Krugman, has an extraordinary knack for translating the complexities of central bank finance, tax policy, regulation, and macroeconomics into lucid, down-to-earth language enriched by shrewd historical and cultural insights. This is a compelling challenge to economic orthodoxy.

April 15, 2016

Superstar economist Piketty (economics, Paris Sch. of Economics) is author of the best-selling global phenomenon Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, which emphasizes his work on wealth and income inequality. The essays in this impressive collection start in September 2008 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and provide an examination of the Barack Obama presidency and the EU's debt crisis. Piketty brings together selections from eight years of columns in the French publication Liberation. These annotated pieces consider tech giant Steve Jobs's career and what it teaches us about economics and obligations which must be or must not be paid. Other writings probe the mysteries of the Carbon Tax; the Central Bank at work; French President Francois Hollande as a new Franklin D. Roosevelt for Europe; what it means to be free; and the how and what of federalism. An essay from Le Monde (the only essay not from Liberation) looks at the crisis in Europe on the night of November 13, 2015, when Islamic State-trained militants launched attacks against civilians in Paris. These excellent essays presuppose little knowledge of economics and provide an overview in nontechnical language of events in the news in Europe, which have relevance to the United States. VERDICT This book by one of the most important economic thinkers of our generation belongs in all economic and social history collections and should appeal to lay readers and subject specialists alike. [See Prepub Alert, 10/26/15.]--Claude Ury, San Francisco

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