A Failure of Capitalism - The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression

Congress...Compact and bracingly lucid...By the last page, not a single lazy generalization has survived Posner's merciless scrutiny, not one populist cliche remains standing. A Failure of Capitalism clears away whole forests of cant but leaves readers at a loss as to where to go from here. In other words, it is only a starting point--but an indispensable one. -- Jonathan Rauch New York Times Book Review 20090517 [Posner] has the rare kind of mind that is a pure pleasure to watch in action, regardless of the subject and the argument being made. -- John Lanchester New Yorker 20090601 Richard Posner is one of America's most prominent and prolific public intellectuals...With his concise, jargon-free analysis of the current economic crisis, Posner has cast his lot with those who believe that the "depression" (given the steep reduction in consumption, credit and production, the term, he insists, is appropriate) was the result "not of intrusive, heavy-handed regulation of housing and finance, but of deregulation, hostility to taxation and to government in general." -- Glenn C. Altschuler Jerusalem Post 20090619 Richard Posner is a phenomenon...He provides a very competent account of the events which led to the current crisis, with an emphasis on the political and ideological context. -- John Kay Financial Times 20090731 [Posner] is the quintessential U.S. economic-conservative intellectual...So an excoriating attack by Posner on modern financial market practices is news. A Failure of Capitalism is precisely that. There are still U.S. conservatives who think the crisis was overdone, that the policy response has been too great, that this was merely a crisis of confidence and liquidity, and that the banking system was not insolvent, merely illiquid. That is not Posner's view. His judgment is that the banking system is insolvent and the crisis that took place in 2008 transformed a recession in the US into a depression...In his preface, Posner emphasizes that he has written the book in medias res, a lawyer's way of saying "in the thick of it," with the implication that he has yet fully to make up his mind. He has, however, offered a thought-provoking interim analysis of what went wrong. -- Warwick Lightfoot Financial World 20090701 The best book describing this malaise is Richard Posner's A Failure of Capitalism. The distinctiveness of his case is that he is a prominent conservative thinker with the intellectual acuity to argue that the crisis is not to do with the traditional enemy of conservatism, big government, but is a consequence of decisions taken by private firms. The ill-effects of those decisions were worsened by deregulation of banking. -- Oliver Kamm The Times 20091205 [A] compelling read...Notable for [its] high seriousness and sophistication. -- Robert Teitelman Huffington Post 20101223 [Posner's] bracing and intellectually admirable A Failure of Capitalism demands attention. -- Jonathan Kirshner Boston Review 20110101