The Trouble with Capitalism: An Enquiry Into the Causes of Global Economic Failure

Former senior research consultant with the Economist, Shutt is no laissez-faire Thatcherite. In this succinct analysis, Shutt argues that investors and governments lusting for exponential returns in a contracting economy have pushed global markets to the edge of an abyss. Dismissing supply-siders and the notion that technology and global trade create more and better jobs, his research has found instead increasing structural unemployment, diminishing returns to labor and capital and diminishing ability to tax. He notes, as Western media is loathe to do, that government policies of corporate welfare, privatization and financial bailouts represent an irresponsible transfer of present and future wealth from citizens to corporations, resulting in debilitating government debt that in turn is dumped into the market to stimulate greater returns. Western policies toward the IMF repeatedly cripple less-developed countries with misconceived economic reforms that plunder assets and explode debt. The result is a pyramid scheme in which Western governments pump up global financial markets, underwriting profligate bank practices and manipulating financial markets. Shutt argues that parabolic rises in markets, CEO compensation and political campaign funding masquerade such recycling as real growth. Shutt's solutions posit an encompassing ""collective responsibility,"" whose lack he consistently laments. Shutt is one of the few to expose capitalism's lies and imperfections, faults that critically threaten our democratic survival into the next century. (Aug.)