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Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

de Rana Foroohar

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1685161,316 (4)7
"Eight years on from the biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008 still remain unlearned--and our financial system is just as vulnerable as ever. Many of us know that our government failed to fix the banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. But what few of us realize is how the misguided financial practices and philosophies that nearly toppled the global financial system have come to infiltrate ALL American businesses, putting us on a collision course for another cataclysmic meltdown. Drawing on in-depth reporting and exclusive interviews at the highest rungs of Wall Street and Washington, Time assistant managing editor and economic columnist Rana Foroohar shows how the "financialization of America" - the trend by which finance and its way of thinking have come to reign supreme - is perpetuating Wall Street's reign over Main Street, widening the gap between rich and poor, and threatening the future of the American Dream. Policy makers get caught up in the details of regulating "Too Big To Fail" banks, but the problems in our market system go much broader and deeper than that. Consider that: · Thanks to 40 years of policy changes and bad decisions, only about 15 % of all the money in our market system actually ends up in the real economy - the rest stays within the closed loop of finance itself. · The financial sector takes a quarter of all corporate profits in this country while creating only 4 % of American jobs. · The tax code continues to favor debt over equity, making it easier for companies to hoard cash overseas rather than reinvest it on our shores. · Our biggest and most profitable corporations are investing more money in stock buybacks than in research and innovation. · And, still, the majority of the financial regulations promised after the 2008 meltdown have yet come to pass, thanks to cozy relationship between our lawmakers and the country's wealthiest financiers. Exploring these forces, which have have led American businesses to favor balancing-sheet engineering over the actual kind and the pursuit of short-term corporate profits over job creation, Foroohar shows how financialization has so gravely harmed our society, and why reversing this trend is of grave importance to us all. Through colorful stories of both "Takers" and "Makers," she'll reveal how we change the system for a better and more sustainable shared economic future"-- "Award-winning business journalist Rana Foroohar shows how the shortsighted and misguided financial practices that nearly toppled the global economy in 2008 have come to infiltrate all corners of American business--putting us on a dangerous collision course to another economic meltdown that will make 2008 look like a mere blip in the business cycle"--… (mais)
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Exibindo 5 de 5
Finally, a book that helps makes sense of our economic situation and how we can have growth in GDP while wages are stagnating and the middle class is shrinking. ( )
  pollycallahan | Jul 1, 2023 |
I had two reactions to this book. First, I enjoyed the research and writing that went into it. You need not be an economics major or have an MBA to understand the stories or the points the author was making. Second, it was very discouraging to realize the power of elites, banks and big investors regarding America's businesses. There were a number of eye opening stories on how markets and companies were manipulated and not in a good way for consumers, employees and Main Street. If you have doubts about our capitalistic economy, your doubts will increase after reading this book.

My Notes and quotes from this book:

This book is an attempt to start that conversation—to illustrate how takers came to dominate makers in our economy, and how we can craft a better future.

Airlines often make more money from hedging on oil prices than on selling seats—while bad bets can leave them with millions of dollars in losses.

Rather than funding the new ideas and projects that create jobs and raise wages, finance has shifted its attention to securitizing existing assets (like homes, stocks, bonds, and such), turning them into tradable products that can be spliced and diced and sold as many times as possible—that is, until things blow up, as they did in 2008.

According to a Stanford University study, innovation tails off by 40 percent at tech companies after they go public, often because of Wall Street pressure to keep jacking up the stock price, even if it means curbing the entrepreneurial verve that made the company hot in the first place.

Studies show that up to 70 percent of the mergers pushed by Wall Street end in disappointment.

Instead of turning the finest business minds into innovators and job creators, it’s turning the people who will run the next generation of American businesses into glorified number crunchers. Business education, it turns out, is failing business.

The bottom line, though, is that far from empowering business, MBA education has fostered the sort of short-term, balance-sheet-oriented thinking that is threatening the economic competitiveness of the country as a whole.

Apple has borrowed most of the money needed to do these massive investor payouts, at the lowest rates in corporate history, in order to avoid taking money out of offshore tax havens and paying the US corporate tax rate on it.

Since 2004, American firms have spent a stunning $7 trillion buying back their own stock—the equivalent of half their profits.

Financially driven outsourcing, worker displacement by cost-saving technology, payouts to investors rather than investments in workers and assets, and short-term thinking in the boardroom and C-suites has undermined American business’s competitiveness and the ability of US firms to create secure, decent-paying jobs.

Washington did a great job saving the banking system in ’08 and ’09 with swift bailouts that averted even worse damage to the economy. But…it has done a terrible job of re-regulating the financial industry and reconnecting it to the real economy.
( )
  writemoves | Oct 26, 2021 |
A brilliant book, diving into the shift from our focus on business (before WWII) to finance (post WWII), the difference between the two, and our need to reorient back to a focus on business (not what happens at Wall Street, but what happens on Main Street). Foroohar takes the common disparagement 'Makers and Takers' (a conservative epithet in common parlance: the first is usually framed as individuals who work, while the second are the 'welfare queens') and turns it on its head: in her opinion, makers are the persons (on 'Main Street') who are actually, tangibly producing goods and services. Takers are those who do not produce anything tangible or functionally useable - the mavens of Wall Street and the finance industry who only trade. Foroohar shows historically how this shift happened, with a transformation of (mainly American, but eventually global) university business schools/departments and a shift of focus away from production to financial trading. She also helpfully illustrates how certain common procedures are harmful to the global economy; a primary example is the practice of shareholder buy-backs, wherein shares of a company are repurchased by a company in order to goose share price, artificially driving the value of a company higher. A very good read: well documented and clear. I highly recommend it.
  ldbackues | Mar 27, 2020 |
Warning: don't read this unless you are ready to be less ignorant of the world around you. From the housing market to retirement to corporate finance, this book will inform and annoy you. ( )
  kallai7 | Mar 23, 2017 |
It is quite obvious that there is something fundamentally wrong with our economic system, a system in which the CEO of a corporation is paid several hundred times the wage of its average worker. A system in which the wages of workers have remained flat despite decades of productivity growth. A system in which well over half the wealth of the nation is held by 1% its people. A system in which (as the author tells us) "the top twenty-five hedge fund managers in America make more than all of the country's kindergarten teachers combined."

But unjust wealth distribution is not the only problem. Our financial system as it exists today may actually be detrimental to our economy.

In this book, Rana Foroohar (a business writer for Time Magazine and a CNN economic analyst) argues that Wall Street financiers have warped the system to their benefit. They have successfully pushed the idea that making money, rather than making goods, creating jobs, or providing services, is the primary job of any business. They see money as the ultimate gauge for measuring the value of all things, and they treat it almost like a commodity to be traded and manipulated as if it has some intrinsic value.

It doesn't, of course. Money is simply a tool, a means to facilitate the trade of goods and services. It is, at best, a representation of the value produced by makers who build, grow, and create things that have real value. When banks loan money to makers, they provide a legitimate service. Loans can help business get started. They can help makers make.

But our financial system has mutated beyond simple banking. It has become a system that allows money manipulators to become takers. These takers provide nothing of real value to our economy themselves, but they can skim a great amount of wealth from those who do. Worse, they exert pressure on businesses to maximize short-term monetary gains over long-term growth and innovation. If an expenditure (such as R&D or worker benefits) is unlikely to increase quarterly profits, it's less likely to be made. Money spent on growing a business is money that can't be given to investors.

This isn't a comforting picture. It seems fairly obvious to me that a system that gambles on debt, places quarterly profits above long-term benefits, that skims wealth from those who create it and then hordes that wealth rather than recirculating it back into the real economy, is destined to fail. It has before, most recently in 2008. The government bailed out the financiers then, but the government is heavily in debt now as well, a fact that can also be attributed to the influence of the financiers. Wall Street controls a great deal of wealth, which is used to further the interests of financiers in the halls of government and in the offices of businesses. It promotes policies and practices that allow it to squeeze wealth from the economy like water from a sponge. This can continue only as long as the wealth being created by makers exceeds the wealth being squeezed out by takers. As long as this is true, economic growth can still happen, although much slower than it might be otherwise. When the takers squeeze out as much as goes in, the economy will stagnate. It may collapse.

At the end of this book, Foroohar suggests some strategies to prevent takers from squeezing dry our economy. These include simplifying our economic policies, better regulation of financial services, and a few philosophical changes about what businesses and banking are actually for. I wish I could say that I thought these might happen, but I fear that they won't. The influence of the financial system is too great. Countering that would take more courage from our politicians and greater interest from voters than they have demonstrated in the recent past. ( )
  DLMorrese | Oct 14, 2016 |
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"Eight years on from the biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008 still remain unlearned--and our financial system is just as vulnerable as ever. Many of us know that our government failed to fix the banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. But what few of us realize is how the misguided financial practices and philosophies that nearly toppled the global financial system have come to infiltrate ALL American businesses, putting us on a collision course for another cataclysmic meltdown. Drawing on in-depth reporting and exclusive interviews at the highest rungs of Wall Street and Washington, Time assistant managing editor and economic columnist Rana Foroohar shows how the "financialization of America" - the trend by which finance and its way of thinking have come to reign supreme - is perpetuating Wall Street's reign over Main Street, widening the gap between rich and poor, and threatening the future of the American Dream. Policy makers get caught up in the details of regulating "Too Big To Fail" banks, but the problems in our market system go much broader and deeper than that. Consider that: · Thanks to 40 years of policy changes and bad decisions, only about 15 % of all the money in our market system actually ends up in the real economy - the rest stays within the closed loop of finance itself. · The financial sector takes a quarter of all corporate profits in this country while creating only 4 % of American jobs. · The tax code continues to favor debt over equity, making it easier for companies to hoard cash overseas rather than reinvest it on our shores. · Our biggest and most profitable corporations are investing more money in stock buybacks than in research and innovation. · And, still, the majority of the financial regulations promised after the 2008 meltdown have yet come to pass, thanks to cozy relationship between our lawmakers and the country's wealthiest financiers. Exploring these forces, which have have led American businesses to favor balancing-sheet engineering over the actual kind and the pursuit of short-term corporate profits over job creation, Foroohar shows how financialization has so gravely harmed our society, and why reversing this trend is of grave importance to us all. Through colorful stories of both "Takers" and "Makers," she'll reveal how we change the system for a better and more sustainable shared economic future"-- "Award-winning business journalist Rana Foroohar shows how the shortsighted and misguided financial practices that nearly toppled the global economy in 2008 have come to infiltrate all corners of American business--putting us on a dangerous collision course to another economic meltdown that will make 2008 look like a mere blip in the business cycle"--

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