How did Goldman Sachs end up posting the largest quarterly profit in its 140-year history and paying out a record amount for employee bonuses this year—after receiving a massive taxpayer-funded bailout last year? And what’s up with the other megabanks posting multibillion dollar profits—JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup—while the rest of the economy teeters, and unemployment nears double-digits? How did they manage to screw us all, and game the system so beautifully that their shareholders ended up sitting pretty?
Hell, I don’t know. But Les Leopold does.
Leopold was interviewed on the Sustainability Segment of Mind Over Matters (on KEXP, possibly Seattle’s coolest radio station) to talk about his book, The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It, and shed a little light on this mad rollercoaster ride we call “the economy.”
KEXP: What led you to write The Looting of America?
LL: Well, there’s actually two parts to that story. I got interested in these weird financial instruments that I couldn’t understand—this was about two years ago—and I thought about writing something for people that would make finance more accessible, because I didn’t know anything about it, and I thought, well, if I could figure it out, I could share it. Because I had a feeling this was going to be important, but I had no idea how important. I kind of put it down for a while, because it was getting too complicated for me, and then, boom, the economy collapsed. The financial sector collapsed. And I fortunately had done a lot of research on it already, so I pulled it together and created what I hope is a very accessible guide to what happened, and what we can do about it.
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