Sabotage, Anastasia Nesvetailova
Sabotage, Anastasia Nesvetailova
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Sabotage
The Hidden Nature of Finance

Author: Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Narrator: Jared Zak

Unabridged: 6 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 01/28/2020

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

I don't like the word 'sabotage',"--a former Goldman Sachs trader admitted. "It's just harsh.... Though, frankly, how else do you make money in this business...I mean, real money."

The fundamental motive for financial innovation is not to make the system work better, but to avoid regulation and oversight. This is not a bug of the financial system, but a built-in feature. The president of the US is not a tax avoider because he is an especially fraudulent financier; he's a tax avoider because he is a wealthy man in a system premised on such deceit. Finance is an industry of sabotage.

This book is a brilliant, intellectual detective story that traces the origins of financial sabotage, starting with the work of a prescient American economist who saw the capacity for banks and businesses to dissemble and profit as early as the 1920s. What was accomplished modestly in the first half of the 20th century became a booming global industry in the 1980s. Financialization took over everything, culminating in instruments so complex and confusing their own creators were being destroyed by them in 2008.

With each financial bust, people expect to hear who the culprit was, and cynically know to not expect much punishment to ever reach them. But the innovation of this book is to show that each individual gaming the system isn't a crook---the whole system is sabotage.

Reviews

Dit boek legt het heel goed uit hoe alle complexe financiële instrumenten en crisis werkt. Helaas vind ik dat de concept sabotage wat "shallow" is. Ik heb wat meer diepte verwacht. Sabotage vind ik nog niet goed genoeg uitleg om te verklaren waarom zulke complexe financiële instrument en crisis best......more

Goodreads review by Brian

Veblen doesn't get enough credit or recognition as an important economist these days, and I appreciate the revival of one of his key hypotheses. Simply put, major businesses are able to make profits through controlling markets, rather than competing in them. They control markets through a variety of......more

Goodreads review by Ian

Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan's ‘Sabotage’ is an astonishing indictment of a global finance sector that’s effectively gone rogue. The authors claim that at least half of what banks and other finance firms do is socially useless if not actively destructive. They say most financial firms are......more

Goodreads review by Molly

This book was an interesting read for me because I know very little about financial services. However, I saw this book described as 'required reading for every civil servant, regulator and politician in the UK and elsewhere' and decided it was high time I educated my self. The book starts with a sim......more

Goodreads review by John

Sabotage does a good job of unpacking some complex ideas. While you might be able to find these hidden within economic theory, it combines a decent overview of market control and its implications with short anecdotes and stories to back it up. It's not an academic book - you won't pour through it fo......more