Waubonsee Community College

Why save the bankers?, and other essays on our economic and political crisis, Thomas Piketty ; translated from the French and annotated by Seth Ackerman

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index present

non fiction

Why save the bankers?

913924068

Thomas Piketty ; translated from the French and annotated by Seth Ackerman

and other essays on our economic and political crisis

Thomas Piketty's work has shown that unfettered markets lead to increasing inequality. Without meaningful regulation, capitalist economies will concentrate wealth in an ever smaller number of hands. Armed with this knowledge, democratic societies face a defining challenge: fending off a new aristocracy. For years, Piketty has wrestled with this problem in his monthly newspaper column, which pierces the surface of current events to reveal the economic forces underneath. Why Save the Bankers? brings together selected columns, now translated and annotated, from the period book-ended by the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the Paris attacks of November 2015. In between, writing from the vantage point of his native France, Piketty decodes the European sovereign debt crisis, an urgent struggle against the tyranny of markets that bears lessons for the world at large. And along the way, he weighs in on oligarchy in the United States, wonders whether debts actually need to be paid back, and discovers surprising lessons about inequality by examining the career of Steve Jobs

Why save the bankers? -- A trillion dollars -- Obama and FDR: a misleading analogy -- Profits, wages, and inequality -- The Irish disaster -- Central banks at work -- Forgotten inequalities -- Mysteries of the carbon tax -- Lessons for the tax system from the Bettencourt affair -- Enough of GDP, let's go back to national income -- Down with idiotic taxes! -- Who will be the winners of the crisis? -- With or without a platform? -- Record bank profits: a matter of politics -- No, the Greeks aren't lazy -- Europe against the markets -- Rethinking central banks -- Does Liliane Bettencourt pay taxes? -- Toward a calm debate on the wealth tax -- Should we fear the Fed? -- The scandal of the Irish bank bailout -- Japan: private wealth, public debts -- Greece: for a European bank tax -- Poor as jobs -- Rethinking the European project--and fast -- Protectionism: a useful weapon ... For lack of anything better -- Francois Hollande, a new Roosevelt for Europe? -- Federalism: the only solution -- The what and why of federalism -- Action, fast! -- Merkhollande and the Eurozone: shortsighted selfishness -- The Italian elections: Europe's responsibility -- For a European wealth tax -- Slavery: reparations through transparency -- A new Europe to overcome the crisis -- Can growth save us? -- IMF: still a ways to go! -- Libé: what does it mean to be free? -- On oligarchy in America -- To the polls, citizens! -- The exorbitant cost of being a small country -- Capital in Hong Kong? -- Capital according to Carlos Fuentes -- 2015: what shocks can get Europe moving? -- Spreading the democratic revolution to the rest of Europe -- The double hardship of the working class -- Must debts always be paid back? -- A crackdown alone will solve nothing