|  | Author: Gerald F. Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
List Price: $29.95
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as of 11/24/2009 19:11 CST details
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Seller: Florida Panhandlers
Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 92159
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0199216614
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.0410973
EAN: 9780199216611
ASIN: 0199216614
Publication Date: June 15, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: brand new hard cover with dust sleeve as arrived from publisher - ships with tracking #
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Showing reviews 11-15 of 38
Have free markets gone to far? July 11, 2009
Steve Burns (Nashville, TN)
This book will be interesting to readers fascinated with the financial markets and the recent meltdown caused by over speculation. This book weaves the tale of the employees and citizens of the United States who evolved into investors looking at the whole world through the eyes of a capitalist. (From the book)"Home is not simply a place to live , but an option on future housing price increases. We now refer to education, talent, and personality as human capital-not ironically, but as an obvious fact. Friends, families, and neighborhoods are now social capital, investments that might pay off down the road... The individual's place in an ownership society is as an investor, buying and selling securities for their economic and social portfolios."
"Managed by the Markets makes one large argument: that the shift from manufacturing to a service economy in the United States has been decisively shaped by finance." Corporations no longer act as feudal states promising medical care and pensions to its lifetime workers. With world competition for labor and productivity the corporate welfare state has passed away, and along with it the loyalty of employees. Employees now behave more like independent contractors than company men. With their portable 401Ks their own responsibility and medical coverage declining or nonexistent with some companies, employee dedication is waning. Also the biggest U.S. corporations have changed from ones involved in manufacturing to retailers and the service industry leading to decreased opportunities to work yourself up the corporate ladder. Trading jobs at GM and GE for Wal*Mart and McDonald's is a huge shift in the employment world for making a living.
This book goes into detail about many areas of the modern economy and it evolution over the past 50 years into one driven by finance. It is very deep reading and sometimes monotonous, I would have like a writing style with more personality. However the information is very informative and worth the effort. I recommend this book for those with a deep understanding of economics and free markets and a good attention span to really get the value from this book. Others may find it difficult to get through.
 Educational but repetitive July 2, 2009
David G. Schwartz (Las Vegas, Nevada)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
We live in a world where finance has outstripped production, where it is more important to make money than to build cars or refrigerators. In Managed by the Markets, Gerald Davis tries to make sense of this transition. He raises some interesting points, but ultimately the book is short-sold by needless repetition. It would make an intriguing 30-page article, but there's not nearly enough material here for a 300-page book.
Case in point: an 8-page preface introduces the arguments of the book: "finance had become the new American state religion," and citizens had been transformed into investors, as "the expansive use of financial markets has shaped the transition from industrial to post-industrial society in the United States over the past three decades." This is followed by a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book's structure. Fair enough. But then, the 30-page first chapter does the same thing, in expanded form, including an even longer summary of the chapters to come.
The author has a tendency to, as Gorilla Monsoon might have put it, "go to the well once too often." For example, on page five he describes the change to a financial-market based capitalism as a "Copernican revolution." It's a fine analogy for the world-shifting rise of markets as the arbiters of capital. But he then re-uses the metaphor three more times in the next 50 pages. It's overkill. He also has a tendency to find amusing instances of finance run amok-David Bowie issuing $55 million in bonds against future royalties, or a Norwegian town investing in American mortgages-and use them repeatedly, suggesting that there's not much depth to his research outside the small circle of factoids that are rotated in and out of the text. There is some really interesting material here, but it's run into the ground over the course of the book.
The book's highlights are Davis's analyses of the rise and fall of corporate "social responsibility," the profound impact of the shift from bank financing (loans) to market financing (stocks and bonds) on the world's business, and the rise of the vendor state. Each of these developments has serious implications for public policy, and Davis advances thoughtful ideas, though they are rooted in the concept that bigger is better (there's a great deal of nostalgia for the big corporations of the mid-20th century) and it is difficult to see how any amount of regulation or planning could put the genie of finance back into the bottle at this point.
In short, the ideas are of interest, but the presentation leaves something to be desired.
 Author managed something, but not sure what July 1, 2009
Eric C. Sedensky (Madison, AL, US)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
The subtitle of this book is "How Finance Re-Shaped America". So I presumed that's what would be explained. In this book, however, all the author does is throw together a bunch of data and anecdotes, along with some (I guess) sharp analysis, and conclude that chasing money has reshaped our society. We've gone from agrarian to industrial to commercial to financial. We've gone from only rich people owning stocks to everybody who works owning stocks (or shares of funds that hold stock). We've gone from local to regional to national to global. Well...no kidding. We're not all Amish. Maybe this book really does explain a little bit about how all that happened, but I don't know, it seems so obvious to me. Like this comment from the author: "In this chapter I argue that the basic function of financial intermediation changed fundamentally due to securitization--turning loans and other obligations into securities." Wow! Was that issue up for debate? Doesn't anybody who reads a newspaper or looks at a financial website know that already? What exactly are we arguing? To be sure, the book is well written (if a little dry) and the data and analysis are accurate enough, but I don't need a book like this to know that the financial world changes everyday and is changing our society and our way of life with it. This is a good financial primer and is very up to date, but despite the subtitle, it doesn't explain how finance re-shaped America, or anything else.
 An extremely important analysis of contemporary American culture June 25, 2009
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
As I read in this book a very famous passage from Marx kept springing to mind: "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Marx, who coined the word "capitalism," also argued that it was inherently chaotic. Although I've never been able to buy into Marx's visions of the future (which are far sketchier than many realize), I've always felt that he had a deeper grasp of the nature of free market capitalism than anyone.
This is at the same time a deeply informative and a very important book for our time. Davis chronicles the profound way that finance has led to the restructuring the in past several decades of the American corporation, the banking system, and employees. His account explains the greater systemic problems that led to the housing bubble and its collapse, as well as the current economic crisis that arose in its wake. Frankly, it is a depressing story. I've personally never believed in the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith (and have rarely seen anyone accurately recount Smith's own notion of what that meant), but if the current economic system was the creation of any hand whatsoever, it is the hand of a mischievous and malevolent demigod. The current society that has resulted from the finance-driven markets of the past several decades is certainly not anything that a rational person would yearn for.
One of the more disturbing parts of the book is reading how corporate America, which previously provided much of the social welfare system that is elsewhere provided by the state, is ceasing more and more to provide these benefits. Corporations in Sweden or Germany do not need to provide healthcare benefits because the state does. The U.S. is in the situation of having neither private sector nor public sector taking care of the most fundamental needs of Americans. The same is true of pensions, with most corporations eliminating a company pension in favor of a 401k (I'm extremely lucky in that the corporation for which I work has both a pension program and a matching 401k -- but my situation is increasingly rare). This situation has resulted in a gaping social need in America. At the moment is a spirited debate concerning healthcare (and despite the fog being dispersed by the healthcare insurance companies and their friends in congress and propaganda organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, a substantial number of Americans feel strongly that this is a problem that will necessarily have to be dealt with by the public sector, with a public health plan that will force the private healthcare plans to become competitive). A smaller number of Americans -- though I believe that this number will grow dramatically as the situation in the country is better understood -- have begun to talk about the necessity of a national pension system, to complement social security and the voluntary 401k programs. Why? Because the private sector has ceased to be a reliable player in the provision of basic social welfare needs of Americans. And as Davis points out, talk of an "ownership society" in which individuals took control of these things is now a very unfunny and somewhat rude joke. With companies like Bank of American, Citigroup, GM, AIG, and numberless others unable to take care of themselves, how could individual citizens be expected to do so? The growing consensus is that only a government has the wherewithal to deal with these large problems.
The book also made me wonder how we as a society can do something about the structure of our world. Clearly taking an unfettered free market approach, where everyone and everything can be commodified, leads to a world that no rational individual would like or want. I frankly don't want anything that in any way whatsoever resembles the "portfolio society" depicted in this book.
I've used the word "American" a number of times, as does Davis. Though I'm sure that much of what he writes about has international application, this book is very specifically about the American situation. The meltdown of the economy has hit individuals in the U.S. much harder than in most other developed nations because we have never as a nation come to terms with the role that government should and needs to play in our lives. We have a suspicion of government that is unique and almost defining as a nation. But this unwillingness to access the power of government to provide fundamental services is one of the main reasons that quality of life in the United States overall continues to decline and fails to keep pace with standards of living in many European countries like the Scandinavian countries and Germany. I would liked for Davis to have discussed in greater detail why this has been so much more an American problem. There are hints that I'm aware of. Take Ayn Rand. The United States (and to a vastly lesser degree Great Britain) is the only country in the world that reads Ayn Rand. The few individuals in European or Asian countries who know her books consider her (rightfully) a very bad joke. While the nearly the entire planet views Rand (if they view her at all) as a very bad writer (in the sense of not being able to construct strong sentences and paragraphs), a weak, poor, highly derivative thinker, and someone whose political views are downright scary, in the United States she has a large cult following (an it is a cult: literary critics and scholars consider her as much of a joke as the few people in Europe who know about her do) who actually consider her a sage. I believe that if you can figure out why Americans do not consider Ayn Rand a joke, you will have begun to understand why we allow our society to develop in the horrible way that we do.
This is a book that I intend to read a second time. It is dense, highly informed, profound, and provocative. It should make us all question where we went wrong as a country to end up with the kind of culture that we have. And it ought to lead to a debate about a new kind of society where we can have fundamental things that ought to be at the heart of our society. I would like to see a rejection of the idea that shareholder value is a fundamental value and instead embrace something closer to Roosevelt second new deal as a guide for our society. We'd all be better for it.
I'm in the financial services industry and this book is on target June 25, 2009
Louie's Mom (Dallas)
I've worked in lending and securitization for over 20 years but still found this book interesting. Often people outside the industry make generalizations that are off the mark but this time the author got it right.
To be fair, when the securitization business was going strong in the mid 1990's I saw it as all good - a way to increase competition, and thus give borrowers good rates, while also allowing investors to easily and relatively cheaply diversify their portfolios by buying bonds backed by commercial real estate properties in a variety of markets across the country. At the time I was unaware of how loose the underwriting standards of my company's competitors were, and of how inflated the ratings were on their securities. Hindsight really is 20/20.
This book gives you a good overview of the history of change in our nation's financial services sector, and the effects of those changes on our economy and our governmental entities. In addition, it explains how companies incorporate their various subsidiaries in states and countries based on the tax and regulatory advantages - this goes way beyond just having your official HQ outside the US to reduce taxes and despite my business experience I found quite a bit of it to be new information for me.
This book should be required reading for all college students, without regard to their majors.
Showing reviews 11-15 of 38
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