I’m still reading my way through books on the Great Financial Crisis. The main players are starting to be old friends — the blithely self-assured and then forlorn Dick Fuld, brash and antic Tim Geithner, cool and unyielding Jamie Dimon. It’s a bit like watching the same movie from different camera angles; the story is the same but different. Every book shows me more of the how it happened, none are really able to touch the why.

The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein is one of the more dispassionate accounts. He’s not trying to explain what happened but more to show how it did. Lowenstein’s book on the demise of Long Term Capital Management is also on my reading list. He’s the type of writer you want to read on this sort of story. Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail wants to tell you every moment; Lowenstein swoops in and out, breaking down the breakdown into discrete chunks.

One of the biggest myths in life and in business is “I did it for you.” When someone gives you that line of reasoning, be skeptical. Dig deep enough, and you’ll discover they did it for themselves. The idea that the crisis happened because the moneyed elites on high were somehow trying to give homeownership to the masses like some sort of ladder to prosperity is pure bullshit. The crisis happened less because the loans were made, although that too is a sort of madness, but more because the loans themselves were sliced and diced into stacks of investments spread throughout the world.

It wasn’t, of course, the end of Wall Street; I’m not even sure it was the end of a particular type of Wall Street. Major investment players, such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, were brought down and devoured. Some of the biggest banks, like Washington Mutual and Wachovia, which had strayed far from their roots and became tainted by subprime mortgages, lost their histories and their names.

Maybe this is no tragedy, but the idea of the bank itself and what it stands for has shifted. I’m old enough to remember a time when there were multiple banks in town, denoted not by their brightly-colored ATMs but by their buildings, sturdy and unchanging, by the bankers who were part of the community. Banks had to evolve with the times, perhaps, to meet the moment. Allowing mortgage debt to move beyond the local bank led to economic growth, at first. The path to expansion often leads to destruction.

We never know when to stop. Growth, unchecked, falls so quickly to excess. Quickly in the rear view, but at the time, it doesn’t seem quick at all. Nobody wants to stop the party because they don’t know where it’s going. This time could be the time it doesn’t crash down to bits but somehow magically goes on forever, delivering unending prosperity. To step in, to intervene in progress, is seen as uncapitalistic or even undemocratic.

What is the responsibility of the government to clean up the mess? I recently watched the livestream of Ben McKenzie’s Everyone Is Lying To You For Money, and in the Q&A afterward, he touched briefly on one of my fears, that crypto might be the next bailout. It could be crypto, it could be AI, it will be something. The Great Financial Crisis may have been the end of Wall Street as a locus point of crisis, but not of the cycle of greed that promises prosperity for everyone but mostly benefits those who were already rich to start with.

How do you get over your skis? The metaphor unlocks a little understanding. First, you are driven by confidence. As speed picks up, you are certain that your own ability is driving it, carrying you forward. You are mastering the moment; it is not mastering you. Then the momentum is outpacing you. You get a little afraid, but you imagine that if you go backward, if you lean back, you will crash. Instead, you try to get ahead of it, try to master what is already mastering you.

Those who call for moderation in anything are called Luddites or criticized for standing in the way of progress. There’s a moment in Ben McKenzie’s documentary where he starts to wonder if he’s the crazy one, if maybe he’s just not getting what everyone else already knows. The world is rushing forward; who is he to say slow down? Who are any of us to cry out against the great future?

I’m reading T.J. Stiles’s encyclopedic Vanderbilt bio. I’m in the early part where the steamships keep blowing up, sometimes killing a great number of the passengers. Was the end result of better steamships and the prosperity they unleashed worth it? History says yes. In the case of the Great Financial Crisis, I’m trying to determine what, if anything, the suffering was for in the first place.

I came into my study of money through the back door, or maybe the side door, whichever door included no actual classes in economics. This has been an advantage in many ways. Sometimes we learn more by piecing together our own education, or we learn differently. We learn what we are drawn to. At this point in my life, I could go back to school. I’ve considered it, but I’m also cruising toward my 60s, and I’m not learning to apply it. That’s a different sort of education.

Even without an economics education, I’ve heard of Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. In many books, they are set up as opposing ways of understanding the role of government in economies — the free market ideal versus the heavy hand of monetarism. The truth is far more nuanced, as I learned by picking up Zachary D. Carter’s The Price of Peace, a biography of Keynes but also a deep exploration of his ideas.

People who study economics have a bad reputation: this dismal science and all that. But most of the hardcore money theorists I’ve ever read about or met are some weird and wonderful people. Thinking about money and its uses turns you into a philosopher of sorts. Keynes was part of the Bloomsbury group. If they sneered at him at times for not being an “artist,” they also applauded his successes and benefited financially from them. He was a young gay man who later married a Russian ballerina. He was both concerned about the fate of all people and also an elite snob who liked his luxuries.

The book is less of a straight biography and more of a consideration of Keynes’s shifts in thinking, including his realization that laissez-faire governance might not be enough. In my studies, I keep being drawn back to what happened after World War I and the mistakes that destabilized the world, including the U.S.’s need to be repaid for its loans to the U.K. and Europe’s insistence that Germany be punished as much as possible for the war. I’m currently reading a book on Weimar Germany to understand that more. Keynes argued against the strictness of the terms of peace, partly because he believed that markets needed to reset naturally.

He later came to the idea of more direct government intervention after changing his thinking on the origins of money. He had conceived of money as organically flowing out of the need for more efficient means of trade. His studies later convinced him that money mostly emerged as a tool of the state. That knowledge changed how he saw money and interest rates should be used. He also lost faith in the society-building impulses of the titans of industry, realizing they would only do what served them.

Keynes was an optimist when it came to technology and what might come next. He believed that the future would make money, if not obsolete, at least less consequential. His vision could perhaps be defined as capitalism with socialist features. He imagined that the love of money and the stacking up of it would come to be known as what he calls “a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” I love that phrase so much I want to wear it on a t-shirt. Let’s see money for money’s sake as gross.

Keynes becomes a hero during the FDR era but advocated for government spending and intervention years earlier in the U.K. But even before the end of World War II, the threat of anything that even seemed vaguely socialist became a concern. After the war and the death of both FDR and Keynes, even as the U.S. enjoyed a post-war boom, fears over socialism and, by association, Keynesian economics took over. To be a Keynesian was to risk being seen as a socialist or worse during the Red Scare and after.

Carter’s last few chapters cover what happens next and the legacy of Keynes in the careers of economists like John Kenneth Galbraith. The rise of Friedmanesque free markets, globalization, and the idea of creative destruction are the order of the day. Taxes are lowered, banking regulations are repealed, and the U.S. unknowingly blunders into free trade with the idea that somehow it will always remain at the top of the food chain. Our collective memories are real fucking short. Then as things collapsed around our ears, suddenly a little old-fashioned Keynesian intervention seemed like a good idea. But we saved the wrong people. We bailed out the rich bankers because we believed that you had to save the top to protect the bottom.

As we near twenty years since the world crashed in during the Great Financial Crisis, we are at peak levels of wealth inequality and national debt. Recently, the Treasury Secretary made an intervention not seen in years, turning the government into a bond buyer to drop Treasury yields. What would Keynes make of this? Would he say any deficit is fine as long as the economy is functional? He might, like many of us, wonder where all of this money is going. It isn’t making it down to the people who need it most. Keynes, for all of his Bloomsbury snobbery, believed that all the people must be protected for society to thrive.

This book reminds me that ideas can change the world. We are drowning, it seems, in content, in words, in opinions, but not ideas, not in the rhetoric around ideas. It was never Keynes alone in a vacuum. It was Joan Robinson, Hayek, Schumpeter, and a host of others who agreed and disagreed and were made better through the process. My fiction companion for this book was Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture, a book about Keynesian ideas set in an insomniac’s meanderings. Keynes’s ideas are as resonant now as they were when first conceived. There are more ideas and concepts to be discovered and explored — if we are brave enough and patient enough to commit to maintaining the environments in which they can thrive.

The idea that billionaires might be heavily taxed on what they’ve amassed has sent a ripple of panic around the yachting class. Sergey Brin alone has spent over $100 million fighting California’s proposed 5% tax on the around 200 billionaires living in the state. He’s not alone. Other billionaires and some millionaires aspiring to be billionaires have joined the fight. It doesn’t matter that this tax would be put to immediate use to provide healthcare for Californians. The idea that they might pay more has sent California’s richest and California’s businesses scrambling to Florida and Texas, two states that are more than willing to look the other way as long as wealth comes flooding in.

We know that wealth inequality is at historic levels and yet there’s a feeling of powerlessness about it. It feels like a problem too big to solve, but we, as a nation, have been here before. Casey Michel has been on the money beat for a while, tracing the roots of international lobbying in Foreign Agents and then delving into the tangled webs of international finance in American Kleptocracy. His new book, United States of Oligarchy, treads similar ground. He starts with the Gilded Age and President Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to increase income and estate taxes. It’s hard to believe that at one point income tax rates topped out at 90% and estate taxes were 80%. Tax rates like these incentivized people to stop hoarding wealth and plow it back into businesses and organizations.

Why did taxation like this cease? During the post-World War II period that so many current leaders look back on with nostalgia, the wealthy were well taxed. It took decades to bring taxes down to where they sit now at a top rate of 37%. As for estate tax, married filers have a limit of $30 million before taxes play a role. Some people may say that there are fewer tax loopholes now. That is true to some extent, but lower taxation has allowed wealth to build at astonishing rates. There are still plenty of ways to avoid taxation if you are rich enough. Michel details how Peter Thiel managed to exploit Roth account rules and sock away billions tax-free. Much of the tax shifting takes place in trusts, estates, and LLCs where taxpayers can position gains against losses and still come out ahead.

If nothing matters more than being rich and staying rich, you need more than money; you need control. You need politicians to legislate what you want, and to stay out of what you need them to ignore. Turns out, politicians need you too, or at least they need your money. No matter how principled or experienced you are as a politician, you will likely lose without a lot of money on your side. Decisions like Citizens United have kept that money flowing with fewer and fewer rules.

The rich get richer; there’s nothing new there. What does feel new is a decoupling of freedom and democracy. We are being sold a freedom, or more clearly, a utopia, that doesn’t require our participation. Zuckerberg’s recent AI vision, Musk’s delirious robot future, and Trump’s endless promises of winning share a similar point of view: that all of your needs will be met if you just shut up and let it happen. Don’t thwart us and we will deliver for you. It is a message being pushed to every town where a data center might sprout. It turns out getting people to act against their own best interests isn’t that difficult. You just have to convince them that they too will soon be sharing in your prosperity. It also helps if you appeal to their most base instincts and create a villain that they can easily hate and blame.

Michel unpacks a lot of what has been happening in the current administration and before it, including Jared Kushner’s role as a sort of grifter statesman, selling off his access to anyone willing to pay. Kushner has no real role; he’s neither been elected nor appointed. He does not represent the United States. What he represents is the interests of the Trump family, his own venture capital funds, and a variety of shady interests.

There’s a yawning horror to Michel’s book in that so much of what makes up your normal life (this computer I’m typing on is only the most obvious example) is made by companies that support things we do not believe in. As a shareholder, as an investor, as a human using things and living in society, it feels impossible. There is no opt-out; we are all enmeshed in the greed, whether we like it or not. It’s all so profoundly weird that these billionaires and cheats aren’t shamed. They are celebrated as if they will lead us to some imagined land of prosperity. The freedom they talk about it is not one they want you and I to participate in.

Michel ends the book with some hope. There is a path back. Our laws haven’t been destroyed, merely submerged under the muck of greed. I see a growing awareness among people that something has gone wrong. What I also see is apathy and a sense that it is too far gone to fix it. We’ve been led to believe that it’s just politics as usual. It isn’t. A new world is being created, and it’s not for us.

There are times when capitalism feels like the study of men. Mostly male authors writing about moves men make. There are women scattered throughout financial history, but you have to look for them. What was easy and assumed for a man was a battle for a woman. Things are more equal than they have ever been. Women are earning more degrees and making more money than ever. However, the imbalances are still there.

Capitalism Is Sexism by Doortje Smithuijsen isn’t a money book per se. It’s a short and biting critique of the ways women are still trapped by societal expectations. As she puts it, now we get to choose our inequality. That inequality shows up in a variety of ways, from traditional roles like being a wife and mother, to the time and money it takes to present to society in a female manner. We are sold femininity in a wide variety of ways.

Smithuijsen is a Dutch writer, and her references are sometimes different than what is on offer in the U.S., but the song, alas, remains the same. She’s a younger writer and experiencing the shift that happens when a woman enters her 30s, and all of a sudden you seem to enter a weird game of musical chairs where you need to pick a man and a plan all within the course of a few years. I nearly entered a disastrous marriage in my early 30s because of that internalized pressure. That was in the early 2000s. I assumed things were different now, but everywhere I see signs that the same old traps keep getting reimagined and sold in new ways (see AOC freezing her eggs for the latest version of this).

Body scrutiny has gotten no better over the years. A woman’s body is no less a problem and a product than it was decades ago. We change the fashion but not the need for a woman to fit into an ideal. Women have always been targeted as consumers. Now they have more economic power and agency, but the messages they receive are still the same: spend money on making yourself prettier. This is still seen as an investment in your future. A woman who remains attractive has better opportunities.

Capitalism, in and of itself, isn’t sexism. What’s sexist is that societal messages often seem designed to pull that capital out of women’s pockets before we get to decide what we really want to do with it. I meet too many women, young and old, who believe that investing and finances in general are a man’s province, even when they are out-earning their husbands and boyfriends. Because we are told that talking about money is crass or greedy, we often don’t do it. Wanting money for its own sake, the way men often do, is considered unseemly.

Smithuijsen is appealingly honest in her feelings and the way women are often set up to judge each other. Women have more opportunities and options than ever. They also are on the receiving end of a barrage of pressure to examine every pore of their skin, to focus on who is looking at them rather than what they are looking at. Capitalism has found rich ground in selling women’s problems back to us. I love to see young women here and around the world looking at the system and calling it out.

Last week, I finished The Predator’s Ball on my flight back from the IRS Tax Forum. This week, I’m wrapping up King of Capital, David Carey and John Morris’s story of the rise of Steven Schwarzman and Blackstone. The two books tell similar stories: driven men find new ways of making money, taking more risk, and creating a feeding frenzy for new financial products. Leverage expands beyond all sensible levels while those making money ignore the danger signs.

The terms leveraged buyout and corporate raider got pretty tarnished by the end of the 1980s, but the ability to make money by purchasing a company, cutting costs, selling off parts, and refloating it to the market didn’t go anywhere. Nor did the need for pension plans, insurance companies, and other organizations to keep chasing yield. Traditional pension plan managers used a combination of stocks and bonds to keep growing the money they were entrusted with. But increasingly, the money needed to stretch further and do more. This led to the adoption of modern portfolio theory, adding in more high-returning assets like venture capital and buyout funds. At first, the usage of these types of assets was small; after all, they are high-risk, high-reward instruments. But as they were adopted more and more universally, it started to feel safer to add more and more, to take more chances.

Blackstone emerges out of Lehman Brothers when Schwarzman and Peter G. Peterson strike out on their own because they want to do more buyout deals. Things get off to a slow start, but eventually Blackstone becomes one of the major players, sparring with KKR, Apollo, and Carlyle over a handful of targets. The major private equity firms are suddenly able to raise a lot of capital from institutions looking for high returns, but unless they can find a high-potential company to purchase and retool, they aren’t able to deliver.

Blackstone’s secret sauce, and the reason I started following them in the beginning, is the company’s ability to find and monetize distressed real estate. This was an area with less competition, and they were able to gobble up a bunch of real estate investment trusts. But the same cycle that happened with companies follows into real estate. The need for investments starts ticking valuations up. This happens over and over in business. There’s a group who gets in first and gets the good deals, then things get progressively worse, but no one really notices for a long time. Eventually, greed topples the whole enterprise, and we start again.

Blackstone wasn’t just one business. It was private equity, real estate, funds, and more. This made taking it public complicated. How do you value a business that by its nature is constantly shifting? Profitable, yes, but not in all areas at the same time. The timing of the IPO in mid-2007 wasn’t exactly auspicious. The dealmaking heyday was already in the rearview. The fast deal flow that allowed Blackstone to get big returns slowed along with the economy. That also meant that loans came due and couldn’t be refinanced under the same favorable terms. What came next determined what Blackstone would be in the future. Blackstone has been remarkably adaptable. Schwarzman’s famous line is: “If we don’t reinvent ourselves continually, we’re dead.” The company continues to live up to that, constantly moving like a shark and capitalizing on every new trend.

Predator’s Ball gave a more atmospheric look at the dealmaking and characters. Here you have a fact-based accounting. This is partly the subject matter. I’ve read Schwarzman’s bio; he’s sort of a pill, and that’s compared to Michael Milken, who wasn’t exactly Mr. Excitement himself. This book was written in 2012 when the awareness of private equity was still emerging. The authors go to great pains to point to studies that show private equity isn’t destroying companies, or at least it isn’t any worse than anything else. Maybe.

Blackstone doesn’t always get it right. Like any investor, it makes some dumb moves. It just has always had the money and the ability to raise money in order to recover. Right now, the company is still buying REITs and financing company takeovers, but it’s also going all in on AI, along with some of the other biggies in financing. In many ways, Blackstone’s business comes down to trust. Money flows in because of the company’s track record. The massive AI push is either brilliance at work or folly waiting to happen. This book didn’t make me feel like it’s the former, but hopefully I’m wrong.

Last week, I went to the IRS Tax Forum for the second time. The IRS hosts tax forums in five cities around the country each year. These are for tax preparers of all sorts, from attorneys to CPAs to volunteer tax preparers, and are continuing education designed to keep us current on new rules and changes, as well as understanding nuances of existing systems.

Last year, much of the buzz was around the OBBA and the new rules around overtime, tips, car loans, and the new senior discount. At the same time, we lost a few of the valuable energy credits for both cars and homes. Luckily, this year there isn’t a massive bill to prepare for, but the rules around how overtime and tips are reported have been solidified and codified a bit. IRS forms are always changing, which means the tax software has to change too. One box on one form prompts a cascade of changes both for those reporting the income and those putting it on their tax returns.

I spent more time this year in sessions learning about tax collection. In my first year volunteering as a preparer, I mostly focused on completing a return. Now, as I’m layering in more tax planning and tax advocacy into what I do, I’ve seen just how complicated working with the IRS can be if you owe money. What I tell people in the tax office is that the IRS wants to see a show of good faith: that you are interested in filing your returns and paying what you owe. They call it compliance. I hate that term. I’ve never been good at complying, but the fact is that they don’t work well with you until you start working with them.

One presenter talked about a scenario I’ve also experienced. A person comes in with a letter from the IRS threatening a lien. You ask if they’ve received any letters before that and they say no but when you help them log in to their IRS.gov account (if you don’t have one, please get one), you see a trail of notices. Sometimes the IRS has the wrong address; sometimes they don’t and the person just hasn’t opened the mail. Either way, even the scariest notices are fixable; it just takes patience.

One of the most important resources is the Taxpayer Advocate Service. This is part of the IRS, sadly an underfunded part. They lost 25% of their staff during the DOGE-pocalyse but still have around 1,300 employees around the country. That doesn’t sound like nearly enough to me. This isn’t like those services that advertise promising to take away your tax debt. I actually received two taxpayer scam calls advertising one of these services while I was at the tax forum. They sound like official IRS notices about payments due, but they are bullshit. The IRS doesn’t randomly call and leave messages on your voicemail.

What’s new this season? The IRS is rolling out a new automatic penalty exemption for first-time offenders. The abatement program already existed, but this should be faster and easier. There will be better reporting for cryptocurrency. Last season brought us the implementation of Trump Accounts, the children’s savings account that comes with a $1,000 pilot program for babies. I’m still watching this with a skeptical eye since the main financial partner is Robinhood, but the idea of a children’s account that can take contributions from anyone ($5,000 limit per year) is interesting.

Next up in Trump branding will be the Trump IRA accounts that launch next January. These are IRAs for those without an employee-sponsored retirement program and offer a match up to $1,000 a year (with income and contribution limitations). I’m not letting the fact that he has to put his name on everything blind me to the potential goodness here. I also see this as another way the government is moving toward getting people to save on their own as companies and the government itself pull away more and more support.

As expected, there was a lot of AI talk this year. The number one rule for anyone (tax pro or otherwise) is don’t put your personal information and situation into any generative AI to get advice. AI is really good at giving starting places for general issues, but always verify it with the actual IRS publication.

One thing that several presenters from the IRS mentioned is what AI may do for the auditing and collection side. AI excels at bringing together different types of information. The IRS already has many ways it flags people for audits; AI may increase its power to do this. AI is also changing how you reach the IRS. Expect more use of virtual chats where you may be talking part of the time to a person and part of the time to an AI; it will become increasingly hard to tell the difference. This may speed up some cases, but it’s not flawless and a lot of people may be stuck in loops while they try to reach an actual human.

AI is coming for the tax prep world in a big way. Needing someone to prepare your tax forms may become a thing of the past. It already is for many people, and I hope some version of Direct File returns. Having someone to talk to about tax planning or help with issues, however, is still important. Sometimes I feel a bit like a therapist, one of the presenters said. A ripple of knowing laughter circled through the room. Money is lonely, and taxes can be frightening. No one needs my help to contact the IRS, but sometimes we can all use a guide through the trickier parts of life.

A few months ago, I read Barbarians At The Gate, the story of the RJ Reynolds and Nabisco leveraged buyout that changed the world. The Predators’ Ball by Connie Bruck is another classic of that era, telling the story of the rise of Michael Milken and his transformation of Drexel Burnham into a junk bond powerhouse and a kingmaker of corporate raiders like Nelson Peltz, Carl Icahn, and Ronald Perelman. This was all before he was brought down by the SEC for alleged insider trading and securities fraud.

These days, Milken is most known for his philanthropy and the Milken Institute. In D.C., his name is on some gorgeous old buildings that house his Milken Center For The American Dream, and in Los Angeles, he has the Milken Institute. I was able to attend a Milken Conference once around two decades ago and got to hear Alvin Toffler speak, which changed how I thought about the economy in so many ways. The fact that Milken has the money to continue to fund so much speaks to just how much he made during the time he ran an entire marketplace.

Milken didn’t create junk bonds. They were always there, poorly rated corporate bonds with high interest rates and shoddy fundamentals. What he did was find a way to find the gems and package them up for those who were willing to take the risk and enjoy the high yield when the bonds paid off. Once the business took off, more and more insurance companies, savings banks, and others looking for a thicker spread became interested. There was only so much existing junk bond action to go around and so much eager money.

That’s when Milken transforms from a brilliant student of the market to a market maker, using money and sometimes the promise of money to help corporate raiders snap up market laggards, gut them, refinance the debt, and spin them back out onto the market with better earnings. The deal doesn’t even have to go through for profits to be realized. Through the process of greenmailing, raiders threaten a company and buy up stock until the company offers a premium to make the madness stop. This was a major way Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens amassed wealth until various legislative activities and stricter tax regulations made it undesirable.

The book goes deep into some of the most contentious leveraged buyouts such as Icahn’s battle for TWA and Perelman’s long-drawn-out siege of Revlon. The stories are about more than just the companies themselves but of a transformation happening in business as old money was being bested by strivers who were wily, driven, and not content with business as usual. Beneath all of this is a post-war America, a web of large companies full of middle management who never see it coming. This is Milken’s story, but it’s also what he wrought in an ongoing quest for market-beating yields that sets the stage for new and increasingly opaque financial instruments that thread through the Great Financial Crisis and into crypto, venture capital, and everything that comes next. I’m currently reading The King of Capital, which is the story of Blackstone, and some of the same players show up.

At some point, you have to wonder what it’s all for. Is it just money? Some, like Nelson Peltz, like their luxuries. Perelman wants Revlon so he can ascend among the swells of New York. Milken is driven by something else. Power or some primal urge to conquer, perhaps. The Predators’ Ball was a real event thrown by these men celebrating themselves and their influence through the usual rich man tropes of pretty young girls, fine liquor, and cigars. Glad-handing and joyous, but also quick to screw each other over the best deals. Milken’s world was one where you couldn’t say no to exorbitant fees or to taking on more risk.

It all falls apart, or at least starts to, on Boesky Day, the day Ivan Boesky takes a plea. The SEC has been watching Milken and the firm he works at, Drexel Burnham, for years. So much smoke but no fire until Boesky unpacks part of the Milken method and shares how Milken would “park” a stock with Boesky in order to either avoid filing a disclosure of stock ownership for a particular company (a 13D form) or to hide another future move. The unraveling is slow, and Drexel eventually cuts ties with Milken, who is indicted, serves time, and is barred from the world he once ran so easily. He was pardoned by Trump in 2020.

Why read this now? Because the game may have changed, but the hustle continues. Nelson Peltz is still out there as an activist investor, buying stock and forcing outcomes (here’s a peek at where his focus is now). Carl Icahn recently sold Pep Boys and is now trying to be the spoiler in Tilman Fertitta’s bid to take Caesars Entertainment private. And that’s just the old guard. The corporate raiders are today’s private equity. The same hustle, and the same devastation if you happen to be working for a company in their sights. Junk is still out there too, only now we call it high-yield corporate bonds. Some tax loopholes have closed, but there are still enough of them out there for the fat cats to get even fatter.

I keep thinking about that book cover with the shackled businessman. My friend, the late Bob Hoyk, used a similar cover on his book, The Ethical Executive. What he and his co-author traced was how ethics are slowly eroded through a thousand small decisions and the role that peer pressure plays. The Predators’ Ball wouldn’t be much of a party if only Milken showed up. It’s the creation of a society or group of like-minded folks that makes actions seem acceptable to each other. It happened then; it’s happening now. What stopped or at least slowed the raiders last time was the government. What stands in their way now?

When I was a professional blogger living in Los Angeles, I used to pride myself on being an early adopter. To be fair, I was more of an early-to-mid adopter. I’d hear about the new things from the really cool people and bandwagon on, planting my username on every new social media platform, etc. I heard about Bitcoin early. I don’t remember how early, but my husband and I talked about it at some point when it was between $5 and $50 and, well, we ignored it. We were intrigued enough to discuss it but not tech-savvy or risk-loving enough to figure out how to get some. This could be one of those I missed out and regret it stories, except I don’t, not really. The biggest money move I’ve ever made is to figure out how to be comfortable with not needing too much of it. Later, I watched the crypto stories from the sidelines, sometimes interviewing authors on the subject and watching friends fall into the NFT hype. It’s been one of those I’m old and glad I don’t give a shit moments.

Ben McKenzie gives a shit. So many shits that he’s got a book, a documentary, and a personal platform devoted to tearing down the myths around cryptocurrency and exposing the financial chicanery afoot. Brave work at a time when the President of the United States has been a huge beneficiary of crypto hype. McKenzie’s work is aided by the fact that he was a teenage heartthrob on “The OC” and the anguished Jim Gordon on “Gotham.” His face is recognizable, and he’s used his fame and his undergrad econ degree to amass a body of work on crypto, starting with Easy Money, his book with Jacob Silverman. The book is an origin story for McKenzie’s mission and a companion piece to the documentary, Everybody Is Lying To You For Money.

That McKenzie finds much of crypto infuriating comes through in the book. Some of the other books I’ve read on the subject are more moderate in tone and more in-depth. Some, like Michael Lewis’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried, have even leaned toward the laudatory. McKenzie and Silverman are striving to tell a story that is clear and easy to follow. They want you to be as awake and angry as they are (or at least McKenzie is). They also tie disparate threads together, connecting the derivatives boom of the early aughts to the rise of stablecoins and memecoins. Someone’s always finding new ways to manufacture investments and it’s usually the people at the bottom of the pyramid that get hurt.

Crypto is often sold to the public as different types of things. Stablecoins and Bitcoin are promoted as investments, memecoins and NFTs as a form of entertainment and art, and blockchain as revolutionary technology. That last one, that blockchain could change the world, is the only one that has any legs, in my opinion. There have been some solid uses of ledgers and if the hype that it would revolutionize real estate and property management was profoundly oversold, there may still be something there, but not enough to justify the real financial damage that has occurred. Part of the challenge of crypto is it’s just real enough to seem like maybe there’s something there. That combined with a fear of missing out is what ensnared so many people.

The book takes us through the downfall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. While the resulting financial damage was massive, it was still limited. Crypto has rebounded richly, at least for those who are selling it. The Trump family has profited massively from the sale of crypto tokens while those who purchased them have suffered. You can have schadenfreude about that, but nobody wins when people are defrauded, even if their beliefs are different than yours. Right now, the Clarity Act is being debated in the Senate, which would bring more regulations to crypto while also providing an imprimatur of government approval.

It’s easy to dismiss cryptocurrency as something that doesn’t impact most of us if we don’t invest in it. That’s a bit like saying the Great Financial Crisis only hurt those who had a subprime mortgage. Crypto is being interwoven into the fabric of our financial system and being normalized at the highest levels of government. McKenzie recently testified on Howard Lutnick’s involvement with Tether, the largest stablecoin provider. The revolving door between government and corporations is nothing new, but the current administration’s involvement in business, especially cryptocurrency, is setting a new bar.

I keep coming back to an idea McKenzie expresses at the end of the book that has been on my mind a lot this year. We are a nation, as a world, perhaps, are becoming inured to risk. We are shown that the great riskers like Elon Musk are widely rewarded, and we believe it can happen to us if we just make the right bet. Sports gambling and prediction markets are now a national pastime, something Scott Galloway called the next opioid crisis last year. The conflation of investing and gambling that was behind meme stocks and crypto just keeps expanding wider and wider, giving it a chance to ensnare and devastate more people. Whether we participate or not, what happens next will touch us all.

My continued reading on the Great Financial Crisis has brought me to Alan Blinder’s book, After The Music Stopped. Every book on the crisis has a different window — this one from the former Vice Chair of the Board of Governors and written from an insider’s point of view. Blinder pops up in other books, often as a sharp critic of Alan Greenspan’s hands-off-the-wheel approach to regulation. Blinder’s book doesn’t rehash what happened as much as it centers on the methods used to get the economy back on track and their effectiveness.

The title of this post references the sign hanging in just about every antique store my mother brought me to as a child. When I’m in any antique store, museum, or somewhere with lots of glass, I still reflexively clasp my hands in front of me and bring my elbows in just in case. That fear as a child, that I might accidentally break something that I couldn’t pay for, still lives within me.

What does that have to do with the economy and financial crises? The more I study money, behavioral finance, financial history, etc., the more I see that who we are as people and, in specific, our relationship with risk is everything. Every financial crisis I read about is tied to excess use of leverage. Rich people get there three main ways: they inherit it, they work really hard and are lucky, or they get very good at taking risks, mostly with other people’s money. Lots of billionaires present to the world as option two when they are really either option one or option three. And if you are born into wealth, even modest wealth, I believe you are more inclined to take risks because you’ve been playing with house money. If you are taught, like I was, that you are in constant financial peril, you won’t take risks with your money or anyone else’s.

The men who have gotten us into most financial crises were comfortable with risk. So much so that they convinced us that the risk was not that much of a risk. It’s now seen as fear of missing out, but really that makes it seem as if the call comes from inside the house when really the call to risk is external. I’m reading Ben McKenzie’s Easy Money and I’ll have more thoughts on this and its relationship to crypto soon. But back to Blinder, who does an excellent job at explaining not just how we got into this mess (his explanation of spreads is excellent) but the ways we tried to fix it with a flood of programs with acronyms like TARP.

When I’m in the tax office, sometimes I talk to people who bemoan paying their taxes because they don’t get to designate what the money is for. It simply goes into a box marked for government use. We want to believe this is to keep our communities safe and our roads pothole-free, but especially on the Federal level, it seems like the money is a bit in the wind. Social Security yes; Medicare and Medicaid, yes; defense, within reason, yes; but bailing out multinational corporations who still manage to pay their leaders exorbitant salaries? Maybe not. After the Great Financial Crisis, did the government do the right thing or the only thing it could do? Does the distinction between the two matter? Punish those who broke the economy, and you risk taking down the rest of us as collateral damage. Blinder argues that people’s sentiment over lending banks money blocks us from seeing some of the miraculous work that was done in rescuing them without costing as much taxpayer money as we think.

Banks take in money and are required to send that money back into the world to make more money. How much they hold depends to some extent on regulations and to a big extent on vibes (Kyla Scanlon’s famous term vibecession at work here). One of the things I loved about this book, which might really annoy some economic wonks, is Blinder’s little explainer sections. His breakdown of quantitative easing is particularly helpful for those of us who have heard the strategy used and not known what it was. Essentially, by buying up assets like long-term Treasuries, the central bank boosts the reserves of banks, which should, along with low interest rates, inspire them to make more loans. Essentially, this makes banks more confident to risk more money. More money at risk tends to stimulate the economy. To use the antique store analogy — if everyone gets so afraid of breaking things that they won’t touch anything to maybe buy it, the store goes out of business.

Risk often acts as a pendulum, never still, always swinging from one extreme to the other. I find myself asking a lot lately, where are we in that swing? This is mostly a fool’s errand. When I worked in financial media, we often tried to figure out what baseball inning the financial cycle was in. Useless. Financial cycles aren’t baseball games or pendulum swings that proceed in set arcs. They are jagged and unpredictable. Looking back, we see the warning signs and wonder how we missed them. It’s easy to plot the data points once you know the pattern; it’s less easy when you just have a handful of random dots.

The last part of Blinder’s book focuses on curtailing the next war by fighting the last one. If the Great Financial Crisis was the biggest disruption since the Great Depression, it could be argued that the government didn’t make the best use of the crisis and even the moves it did make have been rapidly defanged, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was actually neutered before it really got created. We ended up with more regulation but not as much as we could have. The government decided party lines were more important than the common good.

Politicians are short-term thinkers because the public focuses on what is right in front of it. When times are good, companies, banks, and investors want to be left alone to prosper. When times suddenly become bad (never quite as sudden as it seems), they want the big daddy government to rescue them, stating the entire economy is at risk. Meanwhile, the deficit gets larger, and costs spiral. Tax cuts are popular, but they are often deceptive and cost us more in the long run. We’ve got real problems ahead: the growing interest on national debt, a declining workforce, and exploding health care costs. Politicians shouldn’t just be people thinking about the next election cycle but about the longer-term problems and how to communicate them to the public, the same is true for appointed government officials. There are things more important than popularity.

This book was written over a decade ago. Since then, the trust in politicians and government has declined rapidly. Pew Research from last winter found that fewer than 20% of people trust our federal government to do what is right. In a recent CNBC interview, Blinder mentioned the Fed’s move away from transparency. The government (and now Warsh’s Fed) has increasingly moved into “just trust us” mode. If our economy breaks again, it won’t be in the last way. It could be crypto, it could be AI, it could be the insurance industry. That last one is the one that most people aren’t watching but worries me most. But a crisis is likely to happen and our government will rush to the aid of corporations once more, leaving us to bear the costs.

When I wrote about New York 2140, a reader recommended that I try The Mandibles. Thank you, , this is quite an interesting and uncomfortable book to read in our current situation. The speculative fiction book was written by Lionel Shriver and came out in 2016. There’s always a little frisson of nervousness in reading a book that sets its world close to our own time. That line from the WSJ on the cover about it being “very funny” seems like satire itself — it’s only funny if you think that financial collapse is extremely unlikely. The book begins in 2029 and starts in a place full of water restrictions, financial shocks, and technology advances contrasted against power outages. It gets worse.

The book follows an upper-middle-class family through its branches, touching on wealth, privilege, and a reckoning that shakes the family. So many fiction books I read don’t touch on money anxiety. They are either full of money (brand names, etc., the sort of glittery work I once tried to write) or they are so strained by the lack of money that the joy amidst privation is shown as a virtue. But this is a book about money first and family second, specifically the tension between money differences in family members whether they are elders still waiting on an inheritance from their parents or siblings who are keenly aware of their socioeconomic differences.

The action heats up when the first Latin American president makes two bold moves to protect the economy: he seizes gold (a very FDR move) and restricts the usage of a new currency, the bancor. Shriver takes this name from an international currency that John Maynard Keynes proposed in the 1940s. In The Mandibles, the bancor represents the end of the U.S. dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency.

What happens next is a Grapes of Wrath-style turn as things just keep getting worse. Instead of the Great Depression, we have the Great Renunciation in which the U.S. defaults on debt and all that was valuable (stocks, bonds, a carefully crafted portfolio) becomes meaningless. The newly impoverished find their tastes, their habits, and their beliefs in their ability of little use in a reimagined world. The Mandibles, at first spread across multiple houses and locations, eventually are all huddled together in a single home, trying to stay afloat as the dollar plummets, resources run thin, and grocery shopping becomes a humiliation of trying to buy what little is available for what little remains.

The Mandibles aren’t particularly dislikable rich people, except maybe the pompous economist brother-in-law, Lowell Stackhouse. In a way, that makes the story more chilling. This isn’t a comeuppance; it’s just life. Shriver spends much of the early part of the book letting the characters monologue about the situation and how things had fallen apart; she then does the same thing toward the end, recapping what has happened through conversations that don’t feel organic but are very instructive. The result is a bit like Andy Weir’s explanations of scientific concepts in his novels; sometimes you just want to get down to the action.

The book’s second section moves ahead to 2047 when the U.S. has become a technology-led cyber dystopia. Taxes are calculated automatically — no more tax returns, every spend is already known to the government. The IRS mutates into a massive government bureaucracy, the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, nicknamed the Scab. The youngest generation of Mandibles is making their way in a new world where the U.S. is no longer a dominant force. The book has a lot to say about the burdens of longevity on a nation with a shrinking labor force.

The burning question for anyone reading the book is whether or not, a decade after it was written, its dire prophecy is more or less likely. The past decade has brought some things I would not have expected to come to pass. Do I think the dollar is going to become completely devalued over the next three years? No. Not because I think the U.S. dollar is inviolate but because I don’t think the rest of the world has its shit together enough to pull something like that off. Maybe that makes me an idiot, an optimist, or a patriot. One thing I know for certain — if we go down, we all go down together.

I dislike that woke is being used as a pejorative. The idea that we are awakened to greater truths about the world and our place in it should be neither celebrated nor disparaged. It simply is. Life is often a series of awakenings, casting off things we were taught or believe about ourselves. Being woke is being aware of the fullness of the experience of others. It it’s uncomfortable, it’s meant to be so.

Such was my experience reading The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley. On the surface, it’s the story of William Howard Taft and Alice Roosevelt’s cruise to the East about the Manchuria. The book’s lens is far wider than that. The cruise is a framework for discussing Theodore Roosevelt, race relations, and the creation of (white) American supremacy meant to lord over the East, simply because it had nowhere else to go.

In the early 1900s, the U.S. was considering its place on the global stage. Not the place it would command two world wars later, but where it sat after it had conquered the middle swath of the North American continent from sea to shining sea. What’s next for a country with big ambitions and no more continental room? The East beckons.

The U.S. reckons with its own imperialism in a rather odd way, rationalizing every aggression behind a shield of morality and Christianity. Colonialism for a country’s own good isn’t a new idea by the time the U.S. gets in on the act. The American ambivalence around its own aggression is a backwards sort of strategy because other countries believe the lie the Americans are telling themselves.

The U.S. sees the East as there for the taking. It’s not alone. Russia lumbers down from the North, Britain looms in, Spain gathers its naval forces, and gentlemanly agreements start to strain. The U.S. makes a mess and a massacre of the Philippines, first portraying itself as a protector and then as a civilizer, sending in Taft with his big boy charm and old boy network as a ravager in a peacemaker’s clothing. The book includes some pictures of the World’s Fair, where the U.S. created a narrative of Philippine savagery transformed under the boot of aggression from wild tribesman to soldier — a turn it tried to make work in its own nation as well.

Japan knew the cost of international relations. It closed its borders and thrived on its own for two centuries until the U.S. assembled enough power to blow over its resistance. Japan, learning from its neighbors in Asia who resisted and were crushed or drugged or humiliated, modernized itself by adopting Western values, or at least appearing to. This was a complicated conundrum for racists who had driven the Chinese from the U.S. and saw all people who weren’t White as inferior. What happened next was a refashioning of the Japanese as “honorary Aryans.” Useful, until they weren’t.

When the Japanese eked out a surprising naval victory against the Russians. President Roosevelt, portrayed in this book as mostly a vainglorious boob, worked with then Secretary of War Taft to create a secret treaty that essentially promised Korea as a vassal to Japan (without consulting with the Korean nation, of course). Taft’s great tour of the East was a secret mission of backroom negotiations.

Actions have consequences; it sometimes just takes a while to see them. The U.S. revived a warrior nation and then cried foul when that nation roared back decades later. It replied with the biggest innovation in horror the world has ever seen: two nuclear bombs.

This all happened a long time ago. Surely our nations have shorter memories. Or do they? The U.S. busily papers over its faults and transgressions; we are served glory in the name of freedom. What we know of Asia seems to fall into cultural buckets that gloss over the complexities of entire civilizations. China is rapidly being fashioned into a different kind of foe — one that is beating us on technological and scientific fronts. I find the level of surprise or even shock amusing, as if it wasn’t Chinese innovations that reimagined the world from the days of Marco Polo forward. I suspect their memories are longer.

We can fear, or we can understand that we are being made to fear, made to see others as evil or dangerous. We can read books like these and think we are more evolved now, or we can realize that there is much we don’t understand about our history, our present, and our future. I’m still learning. Often, it makes me feel profoundly stupid for believing what I was taught, what I’m still being told to accept as truth.

I’ve got a bunch of AI-related galleys I want to read over the next few weeks. I go back and forth on reading about AI. On the one hand, I know I should be aware of what’s coming, the potential, the risks, the impact on the global economy. On the other hand, I’m getting old in ways that feel like I just don’t get it. I don’t want to live in a robot-centered world, and I already feel the ways machine learning has dimmed my brain. I’m a lazy person, I’ll too often take the easy road. When the easy road becomes the default, the potential for torpor and stupor is nearly limitless. Send me back to physical books and paper.

I should know better. Being an ostrich won’t make the issues go away, and as much as I whine on about how I’m going to run off to a cabin in the woods, I won’t. I’m a soft urban person who likes going into Washington DC and seeing the buildings and listening to people smarter than me. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center is one of my haunts. It’s located a few blocks from a Metro station and has a raft of free conversations and lectures sponsored by Vox, Fast Company, and other media.

Last Thursday’s setup was two conversations hosted by Kara Swisher, my forever crush on AI, education and jobs. The first panel was with Ronald Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins University, and Reverend Robert Dowd, President of the University of Notre Dame. Johns Hopkins is known for being a research university, especially for medical and biochemistry topics. Notre Dame, besides being famed for football, is known for a more liberal arts approach through the lens of Catholicism. Very different places and different ways of thinking about AI.

The good of artificial intelligence and machine learning is how fast it can synthesize data. It’s great at this. It can surface all kinds of things faster and more accurately than most human beings. It’s going to lead to all kinds of medical and scientific breakthroughs. That’s not hype. The reality is already happening, and for schools like Johns Hopkins, part of the training is about translating those breakthroughs into actionable medical help. Some considerations are practical, such as how many wet labs and research facilities the school will need; while others are grounded in how researchers will work with AI most effectively. There isn’t a question of whether AI will be a part of the curriculum but more on how it is adopted and adapted. As President Daniels mentioned, they don’t teach metallurgy anymore. The school is always changing, but its focus as a research university remains solid.

Notre Dame, I think, is in a different situation. If you are going to Johns Hopkins, you probably have a solid idea of what you want to pursue. Notre Dame caters to a wider spectrum of students, many of whom are starting from a liberal arts basis. There are plenty of engineering and chemistry majors there, too, but the focus is much more on the traditional educational values of ethics, social good, and guiding young minds. Kara talked with Father Dowd about the Pope’s encyclical on AI and the ways that is guiding how Catholics consider AI. Notre Dame is incorporating AI, but the approach sounded more human-centered, building people who can use AI rationally or even skeptically.

Two schools, two different approaches, but is college the only answer? Former Rhode Island governor and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo isn’t so sure. Raimondo is the CEO of Raise Us, a new nonprofit focused on easing the economy through what she sees as a massive coming AI disruption. Her conversation with Kara will be featured on the podcast at some point in the coming weeks. Raimondo is the kind of no-nonsense New England woman you want running things, smart and determined. In her role with the Biden administration, she was in touch with all the big tech companies and was a leader in getting the CHIPS Act through.

Raimondo is equally bullish and worried about AI. Asked by Kara about how concerned she was about AI she said it was a 9 out of 10, but also said that number defined how much potential she sees in AI. How do you control a thing that could (could, not will) bring massive leaps forward in our daily lives, but will likely (will, not could) lead to massive job losses and economic uncertainty?

Is the risk worth the potential? It doesn’t matter. To some extent, we as a planet have decided we are going forward, regardless of the risk. What falls to us then is to figure it out. While the onus should be, as Kara archly pointed out, on the tech companies, they aren’t acting too concerned. If you follow me on Substack Notes, you’ve probably seen me grumbling about all the press spin I’m seeing on job creation in the trades. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase was the most recent CEO to have his press moment, announcing financing of a shipbuilding initiative in Pennsylvania this week. Do we need more young people in the trades? Absolutely, we have for years. This was something the Biden administration was working on with Build Back Better. But when Black Rock, Meta, JPMorgan Chase, and others are touting their job creation, that’s a signal to me that they are also seeing major job cuts in the offing.

Raimondo’s Raise Us initiative treads similar ground but seems more focused on finding out where the future jobs may be and helping steer the workforce there. For decades, young people have been told that the best path to a career is to go to college. It hasn’t panned out for many who wind up saddled with student loans and no clear way forward. I’m not the only liberal arts idiot who wondered what I should do for work and found myself funneled into a variety of bullshit jobs (and there were far more bullshit jobs in the 1990s than there are now). I think about this when I’m working in the tax office. I look at how many occupations there are and how many might not exist in a few decades.

On the podcast, Kara has a feature where she has someone else ask a question. The question for Gina Raimondo came from reporter Joanna Stern, who was wearing one of the remote cameras that many workers are now using to train the next generation of robots and asked about people training the AI. It was a graphic demonstration of what I’ve seen happening in the freelance world, jobs springing up to guide AI to become better at taking jobs away from us. A doom loop posed as a conundrum — does one stand nobly off to the side, refusing to teach AI to be better at human things or do we take the paychecks now because this is coming anyway?

It’s easy for me to say this isn’t my problem. I’m old. My concerns are probably more about which AI companies are going to implode and collapse the stock market than finding a new AI-based career. But this isn’t just a young-person concern. What happens next is likely to tilt the economy, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently. As much as I would like to believe it’s above my knowledge grade or pay grade while tech goes around moving fast and breaking things, the truth is that we are all going to have to make some determinations about how we live and work with AI.

What didn’t come up too much in the conversations was the human problem of believing that the AI is our friend. The one-sided relationships that people are forming with generative AI are in many ways, what concerns me most. These relationships are real and deep and potentially harmful. One thing Reverend Dowd stressed was that his school is focused on teaching people problem-solving, interpersonal relations, and decision-making — essentially making humans more human. To release the full potential of AI, we have to make sure we don’t lose ourselves in the process.

When I was at the Open Markets Institute conference, much of the buzz was around democratic socialists and their victories in recent elections. For people tired of two parties that feel sclerotic and narrow, democratic socialism feels exciting. For the right, socialism (or as they often term it, communism) represents a sort of existential threat — it is directly in opposition to their values. When you have a Republican senator promising to hunt down Chinese communists, it’s clear that a lot of reframing is going on. Could socialism be a possible solution to the feeling that the boot of capitalism is standing on our collective necks?

For Blake Ashby, author of Socialism And The Democratic Party, the answer appears to be no. Ashby is an interesting character. A former Republican, his has been a long journey over to the Democrats. Like many old-guard Republicans, he found himself pulling away as the party abandoned conservative financial principles while doubling down on conservative social ones. He’s now a Democrat pushing for a blue wave in the midterms.

Ashby spends most of the book defining what socialism is and why Marx believed capitalism would fail, and socialism would supplant it. To some extent, every solution just creates different problems. Create a socialist factory, and you still end up with managers who make decisions to protect or increase their power. Turn over control to the workers and you don’t get unified decision-making, you often get chaos. Soviet communism collapsed because it didn’t serve the people, it just created a different type of elite.

Capitalism is no better. It is full of injustices. While it was suited for a world in which capital allowed risk-taking to flourish, it is now turning in on itself, producing too many goods and fueling wealth inequality. In his book, Ashby talks about the human inability to imagine beyond what currently exists. We can’t seem to get beyond capitalism and socialism as two opposing poles, and so we make variations on the same themes. Ashby sees socialism as a broad failure in all of its incarnations and sees folly for the Democrats in pursuing it and drifting leftward.

His solution is moderated capitalism, a return to a New Deal-style equality supplemented with a robust Progressive-style regulatory agenda and vigorous taxation. Sounds like a great start, although the one thing he doesn’t touch when talking about socialism is socialized medicine — the thing that could really do the most good in the United States. He also doesn’t delve deeper into how versions of democratic socialism have worked throughout Europe.

I’m having a bit of a capitalism summer, reading my way through a variety of books that delve into the history of capitalism (and other isms) as well as studying various episodes of times when the market has broken spectacularly. My reading is bringing up more questions than it is answering, as this book does. I’m wondering if centrist politics, like the middle class, simply don’t exist anymore. As an investor, I know capitalism is in no danger. As a human, I believe we can chart a fairer path.

Government is often in reaction to the economic situation; we don’t so much select an ism as the times demand one. The names and labels we are applying right now belong to an earlier era. What is coming next should be less tied to the writings of Marx and more in the hands and minds of those who will have to spend the next 50 years wrestling with a new world.

When I was in the dating world a long time ago, I had one rule for potential partners: they had to have worked in retail or restaurants at some point in their lives. It’s not a bad rule of thumb for friends, either. There’s something you learn being at the whim of both the customers and the company — it’s not easy or pretty, but it’s a knowing that impacts the rest of your life. I used to believe it made you kinder. I’m no longer sure that is true, but it makes you more open and aware of what the world is really like. Hopefully, it ensures that you don’t treat the people who help you like they are less than you.

Ann Larson’s Cleanup On Aisle Five is about what it’s like to work for a large grocery chain. More than that, it’s the story of the little compromises people make to keep their jobs, whether it’s working through pain or ignoring their impulse to do something kind if it will break the store’s rules.

There’s a lot of coverage lately on burnout, and it’s often framed as overwork. That’s certainly part of it, but I believe another part of it is the need to do something that goes against your beliefs, will, or desire to do your job. It hits at every level, whether it’s not being given the resources to do your job, dramatic job changes (the infamous corporate pivot), or having to constantly upsell or oversell to meet company goals. It’s a tension that plays out in Slacks, Zoom calls, and those “helpful” conversations with your manager. It’s the tyranny of a time clock that sets the value of your labor.

It is, to some extent, necessary that work should be difficult or stressful at times. But it’s gone too far. And the stakes are too high for grocery store clerks who are constantly being put in danger for a wage that may not even allow them to pay for food without public assistance. Larson tells the stories of the people you see every time you shop, but who you may never consider. There are secret rivalries in the grocery store — between different departments, between middle management and workers, but never the corporate overlords who exist in some tower far away, making decisions without considering the lives attached. There is also real solidarity and looking after each other.

Larson also explores the juxtaposition between choice and waste in the grocery store. The amount of food that goes to waste is staggering and it’s not just the prepared foods, although that’s a large part of it. Behind that convenience is an increase in food that must be consumed or destroyed. Decades ago, my husband worked at a Starbucks. We lived on old mozzarella sandwiches with wilted basil and trays of cranberry bliss bars, but he still had to throw away good food every night.

The other thread of this is something I’m known to bang on about, the illusion of choice. As Larson reminds us, most of the foods in any one aisle are from the same few manufacturers, despite the dazzling array of colored boxes and flavors. Grocery stores, too, are massive chains under a panoply of names. We align ourselves with particular brands, never realizing that the money flows into the same pockets.

These jobs are different from what they were 20 years ago. You have fewer teenagers working part-time and more people working these jobs for survival. The jobs themselves are harder — bigger stores, more demands, more potential for danger and harsh treatment. Eventually, something gives out — the body, the mind, the will to keep going. Larson had the luxury of moving on; not everyone does.

My relationship with religion is slipshod and haphazard. I have a sense of the spiritual other, I just have changed what I call it over the years, and the rituals by which I honor it. I’m loosely Unitarian Universalist, should I need a name to tuck myself under. Some of my friends have found deeper faith as they’ve aged, adopting new churches or discovering old ones. I’ve never closed a door to a faith. I believe that there is truth in each, like a puzzle scattered over the face of the earth. What is being done in the name of religion right now is changing how I think about faith, and I don’t like it.

Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies & God is a journalistic look into who is funding the conservative agenda in America. The strange bedfellows of politics had led to a variety of groups, often with conflicting missions, uniting in a common cause, what is often called “woke America.” This suggests that there is a single unified tide trying to wipe them out, a true enemy to rally against. For some conservatives, woke becomes an umbrella term, more effective than simply hating a race or a religion — woke is an enemy with a thousand faces. The movement depicts itself as rugged rebels standing up against a liberal elite.

One of the things I learned in investing is to pay attention to the people on the sides of the leader. The CEO is the face of the course, but he does not always set it. The names we follow in the news aren’t always the ones we should be paying attention to. For years, I would talk to people about Peter Thiel, and they had no idea who he was or why what he was doing mattered. Then it was Rebekah Mercer. Stewart gives the reader more names to note, including John Eastman and the Claremont Institute (not part of the Claremont Colleges but located in the same town).

I read Dark Money years ago. I’m not naive about political funding. This current movement is less about political parties and more about deciding the course of the country. Stewart gets at an idea I’ve been puzzling over lately, the intersection of libertarianism and Christianity. What she calls a creature cantina is a conglomeration of people who don’t share all views but don’t need to as long as they have a common enemy.

The shift among Republicans between 2016 and 2024 has changed the party forever. Those who were against Trump either switched their loyalty or went quiet. Political parties drift; this isn’t new. But this seems less about a party and more about an idea that there is a cultural and spiritual war being fought. Conservatives have long complained that education is too liberal, all the while being educated at Yale, Harvard, UC Berkeley, etc. Now they are building private schools, colleges, and universities more to their liking while at the same time dismantling current educational structures. While the dog whistle attracts a wide swath of people, this isn’t a classless movement — it’s one yearning toward empire, the many guided by the few.

Following the money isn’t just about knowing where the money is going; it’s about understanding why. When there’s money being spent, there’s money to be made. In my opinion, controlling the U.S. isn’t just about belief in a Christian nation. One need look no further than the President to see how the faithful are monetized. His recent recurrent mentions of communism are another way that the elite are building up the idea of the enemy that must be destroyed. It feels like sleight of hand, misdirection from the massive deficit that is eating away at the economy.

Faith, like patriotism, feels co-opted to me. It’s becoming less of a true expression and more of a tool of control. History tells us it was always that way en masse, but I’ve seen the goodness faith can do in individuals and communities. The issue here isn’t about Christians or Muslims; it’s money, plain and simple. The tech elite who have rushed to the Republican flank haven’t found religion; they’ve just found a more lucrative hustle.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has spent decades studying what makes the world go round, and the answer is more than just money. His book, The Mystery of Capital, was written over 25 years ago, but its ideas continue to reverberate. His premise is simple: property rights are essential for a country’s citizens to receive the benefits of capitalism.

Around the world, property exists in what he terms extralegality — people live on it, use it, but do not legally own it. Being outside the law is sometimes a matter of history. Many places were used and improved by people before legality came into play or a new set of laws was superimposed over the old ones. In other cases, people often don’t know how to claim land as their own or can’t afford the legal paperchasing to make it so.

Owning land isn’t just about the ability to receive the benefits of land, whether by farming or renting it out, but also about leverage. Land can be converted into capital and credit. You can borrow against it while still owning it. The value of property ownership is the legality it confers. In many places (including at one point, the United States), land ownership means having a voting stake in government, in being able to claim certain rights as a citizen.

DeSoto traces the history of U.S. land ownership and the early struggles to determine what constituted ownership. The first hundred years of the United States were marked by a wide variety of land grabs, some sanctioned, others not. Some of the founders of the nation, like Thomas Jefferson, believed that land ownership made for good citizenry. Ownership in and of itself confers a stake in the greater good. However, with unclear and often overlapping maps of cities and counties, it was sometimes hard to determine who owned what. Did improving a piece of land mean it was yours? Did paying property taxes mean ownership? The U.S.’s record isn’t perfect here. While our homeownership rate hovers generally in the low 60% range, when that number is broken down by populations, inequalities become clearer.

It’s hard to know what really will make a difference in the fate of other nations. There is no apples-to-apples comparison, no recipe for prosperity. I read about that in Colossus and I’ve been thinking about it in the wake of a flurry of articles that have proclaimed that microfinance has not dramatically lifted people out of poverty and into prosperity. Maybe it was never meant to, or it’s too early to know.

That too may be true of De Soto’s theory; property is just part of the story. The impact on individual lives takes decades to be revealed. Ownership of land can lead to benefits, that is clear, but its direct path to prosperity is tied to the value of the land itself. That in turn is tied to the growth of cities, trade, civil rights, and much more. The book has me thinking about correlation and causation. Is it the ownership of land or the rapid rise in value of land, allowing for more speculation and the movement of capital?

Property ownership is important in that capitalism relies on access to capital. It isn’t the land but the possibility. As De Soto is keenly aware, capitalism has its pros and cons. The yawning inequality in the world right now feels like a chasm set to engulf us all. Owning land, in addition to its value, gives most of us in the U.S. the feeling of belonging and control. That social contract is being broken in many parts of the country. The consequences of that may take decades to appear.

I’m deep in my feelings lately as a U.S. citizen. Maybe it’s the 250-year celebrations, maybe it’s the current state of the republic, but I find myself torn between a deep sense of history and all it stands for and a growing sense of concern and shame. One of my closest friends has already left the country, and more may go. I live so close to the heart of it all, a subway ride into Washington D.C. What felt abstract a coast away when I lived in California now feels suddenly deeply personal.

Although it was written over two decades ago, Niall Ferguson’s Colossus: The Rise And Fall Of The American Empire reckons with some of the same issues that we still face today, especially what should be America’s role on the global stage. The word empire on its own strikes a particular chord. We don’t like to be seen as imperial. The U.S. has often portrayed itself as the unwilling sheriff, stepping up because the world has pinned a gold star on our chest. This viewpoint is a bit disingenuous for a country built by conquering and colonization.

Ferguson isn’t anti-empire. Empire can be a great leap forward for a nation’s citizens, improving quality of life rapidly. He points out the lousy track record of post-colonial nation-building. Another book I’m partway through, Hernando De Soto’s The Mystery of Capitalism, unpacks the reasons behind this a bit more. It’s an uncomfortable topic. Money tends to flow easily across the Northern Hemisphere, but the global south received fewer of the benefits of colonialism. Maybe it’s the resource trap, maybe it’s extractive capitalism, maybe it’s weather and climate, maybe it’s something even more unpleasant, but the record is clear.

There’s a big distinction between regime change and nation-building. While the U.S. is more than happy to topple a leader, both the government and the people are less interested in spending decades to prop up another country. We did it after World War II, not out of some great love but out of the practicality that the world had become a game of Risk, and claiming responsibility for nations was a way of keeping them on our side. Our belief is that our brand of democracy and capitalism is enough. We show them the way, make a few loans, and then head for the exits. Some of this is simply that we don’t need land and resources the way Britain did when it extended its reach across the world. We see more opportunities here than anywhere else, or at least we did.

The U.S.’s inability to reckon with empire, war-mongering when it suits us, but suddenly pulling back, may have done more damage than a constant overbearing presence. An inconstant ally is no better than an enemy, maybe worse because one knows where one stands with an enemy. The economic nature of the world currently is a game with few players who trade capital back and forth.

Fundamentally, we see ourselves as a republic without acknowledging that republics are often run by the elite, as ours was in its founding. Republics have a way of breeding empires, Rome being only the most obvious example. This happens over and over in the course of history. The methods of governing shift back and forth, not deliberately, and often not clearly. Populism, socialism, capitalism, oligarchy, an AI-infused technological empire — all of these things are swirling around us. I’m hopeful we can choose our future jointly and thoughtfully.

I saw Jill Lepore speak at last year’s National Book Festival and left full of excitement to read We The People, her book on the Constitution. I had read These Truths out loud to my husband over many road trips. He unfortunately wasn’t interested in hearing We The People which mean it languished in my NetGalley queue for far too long. So long in fact, that Lepore has another book coming out. There’s nothing like making one feel like a piss-poor reader to know that an author you like has written a whole other book while you are still muddling through the last one. To be fair, it’s a long book, and a dense one, but very necessary for understanding where we currently find ourselves.

The Constitution as a subject isn’t a barnburner. It lacks the brio of the Declaration of Independence. It’s the marriage, not the wedding. Nearly as soon as it was ratified, people wanted to change it. Lepore shows that state constitutions, for the most part, have been much more flexible, for both better and worse. Article V allows the Constitution to be amended, but the process is not easy. Hundreds of amendments have been proposed, many of which we are very lucky never passed. There’s something beautiful about that endurance, but also something ossified. Our country has expanded by leaps and bounds, technology has taken us in new directions, and here we are, tied to the same document written by people who could not imagine the world we inhabit now.

There’s also the question of what should be in the Constitution versus what should be handled by laws and the Supreme Court. Prohibition was an amendment, but the Child Labor Amendment failed. We as a nation still seem to be uncertain about what we want the Constitution to be and what its role is in society. We trot it out when it suits our purposes, cherrypicking the parts that back up what we want it to be. America has never done well with understanding its own contradictions and complexities.

I am finishing up the book this week in the midst of the Supreme Court’s rush of decisions before the summer break. The dividing lines in the court are harsh and political. Our three-part system of checks and balances feels more enmeshed than ever. Should nine people, no matter how wise, be trusted with deciding the scope of the Constitution? Lepore’s book reminds me that it’s been this contradictory, divided, and confusing before. Hey, at least we didn’t end up with Harrold Carswell.

We are a country forever reckoning with itself. I’m also currently reading Niall Ferguson’s Colossus and just finished a chapter of America’s tricky relationship with its own imperialism. We wrap ourselves in our freedoms and seek to export them, meanwhile, our compact with our own people is often broken. Nearly a hundred years after the Reconstruction Amendments, the country was still wrestling with them. We are wrestling with them still. The Supreme Court has upheld birthright citizenship for now but the fact that it is up for debate signals a greater desire to pull and stretch at the corners of our governing laws.

The most consequential amendments have tended to come in flurries, at breaking points in our country when we had to decide that something in the original Constitution did not fit the world we live in. Mostly, we have moved around and through the Constitution. I was still a child when the ERA was being fought for — 50 years later, it could be argued that women didn’t need it, but how much faster could we have gotten here with it? And here is also no safe place, our rights are easily carved away without Constitutional protection.

When a nation becomes so polarized, the idea of a Constitutional convention or even a civil conversation about what it means seems almost beyond comprehension. We can’t even celebrate the founding of our country as one group. Lepore cites studies that show most people believe the Constitution should be reviewed, we just can’t agree on how. However, right now might be the time when this discussion is needed most. Disagree we may, but amend we must so that the garment of our democracy be rendered big enough to contain us all.

Does it seem like everything is getting worse? You can’t watch the shows everyone else is talking about without 15 subscriptions. Anything you buy comes with “smart” features you don’t want and yet are obligated to pay for. Everything that was supposed to be personalized for you now feels weaponized to make you pay more for less. Welcome to the Enshittification. Cory Doctorow’s book, published last October, is a clarion call for any of us who have watched things get worse but never understood why.

A sceptic may say things have always been getting worse. Planned obsolescence is nothing new. Neither is shrinkflation. What Doctorow is talking about isn’t just the outcome of monopolies and price gouging; it’s something deeper. Because technology is so integrated into every aspect of our lives, the gradual worsening of goods and services impacts the quality of our lives. We’ve seen thousands of small businesses crumble in the wake of the behemoths of free delivery without ever wondering who pays the costs. We’ve seen cities around the world struggle to accommodate platform businesses that commoditize housing and transportation. What is being promised as freedom is actually algorithmic compliance.

We know everything is getting worse, and yet it’s nearly impossible to extricate ourselves. Increasingly, we are given the illusion of ownership with the reality of renting. Doctorow goes deep on eBooks and Amazon’s stranglehold on both eBooks and audiobooks, which makes it nearly impossible for an author to have any success without submitting to the whims and costs of being in the Bezos universe (yes, I know Andy Jassy runs the show now).

How do we get out? The back half of the book is devoted to a discussion of antitrust legislation alongside right-to-repair and privacy laws. The problem I see is that young people who have grown up in the digital age are mostly immune to privacy concerns, even as their digital serfdom worsens their lives. The old folks like me who had a childhood and an education before computers see turning over everything to large corporations as a huge problem. Many young people grew up seeing this as the price of admission into the digital world they so easily inhabit. There are signs of this turning (I love the young people reading physical books so much!), but they are fighting a society that is engineered to keep them scrolling. Getting out requires opting for a lot of friction every step of the way.

I never used to feel this dire about technology. I’m glad to know I’m not alone. Doctorow was part of BoingBoing back when I was a professional blogger and has always been refreshingly optimistic and inveterately nerdy. Things weren’t perfect then either, and with age comes nostalgia. However, with the exception of Substack (which is already starting to get enshittified), the online world often feels deprived of joy and discovery. Doctorow lays out some really clear ways to get back at least some of that and details some of the work already happening around the world. Artificial intelligence may be such a large societal shift that it will prompt more universal decision-making. Maybe we saw a little of that with the big AI leaders at G7 recently. Awareness is growing. Doctorow’s solution is a better internet, a return to the old one we had but stronger.

Protesting and advocating for new laws is important. There is also an effective, low-effort option — not consuming, or consuming less. If you have to use AI for work, that’s one thing. There’s no obligation to use it in your personal life. I still use Apple products, but I purchase less often. Same with Amazon, although I confess to using the Kindle app to read this library book. Resist and Unsubscribe has some quick links to help you unsubscribe from some Big Tech services. I try to seek the “dumb” option when making a purchase, although this is getting increasingly difficult. We are under an illusion that we need more tech to make our lives better. We are told that more data equals a better outcome. That is true in some cases, but not universally.

The other day, I realized suddenly that we are already in the midst of evolving from a tech economy to a medical/wellness one. I’m not sure what that means, but once I had that thought, it hasn’t left my head. The next great business of this country is staying alive, staying fit, etc. except that as usual it will be those without money who suffer the worst outcomes and end up in service to those who can pay. The same old extractive economy through a different lens. The enshittification of healthcare isn’t something Doctorow talks about but the same cycle of paying more for less is in play there too.

The last section of Doctorow’s book asks the question about the relationship between enshittification and capitalism. Much of my focus right now is on studying capitalism, its origins and outcomes, so I was curious to hear his take. He defines himself as a leftist. He doesn’t get deep into the enshittification impact of private equity (I’m reading several other great books about that now) in this book but I suspect it might make an appearance in his new one. His new book out now is The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. The reverse centaur concept came up in Enshittification. It refers to tech companies using tech to bend humans to their whims, think delivery drivers, coders, and really anyone whose workflow is now at the whims of what technology says it should be, which, unfortunately, is anyone in any sort of corporate workforce. I find myself thinking about this the way I think about recovery — the first step is realizing there is a problem. That we know. Now, let’s see what we can do about it.

I picked up Sebastian Mallaby’s biography of Alan Greenspan, The Man Who Knew Too Much before the Fed Chair’s death. I’d already read Greenspan’s autobiography and Bob Woodward’s Maestro. Maybe there was nothing more I could learn about Greenspan but Mallaby, who wrote More Money Than God about the origins of hedge funds, is no ordinary biographer.

Much of the book’s beginnings were trod ground for me — Greenspan’s early jazz career, his love of baseball and obscure statistics, and of course, his position inside Ayn Rand’s inner circle. Mallaby’s book begins almost as a devotion but quickly veers away from that as it contradicts some of Greenspan’s own beliefs about himself and his actions.

What Mallaby finds is that Greenspan can be both adamantine about what he knows and then by turns surprisingly flexible when he wants something more. Brilliance can sometimes be overshadowed by ambition. While Greenspan himself often acted like a man who pored over his books and was plucked from New York and ferried to Washington D.C., he was also someone who got a big charge out of being close to power and in power himself.

The book is divided into three sections: the ideologue, the politician, and the central banker. Politics teaches Greenspan compromise and not always for the better. He becomes stealthy, able to use other people as a shield to help him get his own way without suffering the consequences. Greenspan’s anodyne personality helps him get away with a lot; there’s an absent-minded professor quality that makes it seem as if human emotions are coming in via telegram, distant and non-immediate.

As I made my way into the central banker portion of the book, it occurred to me that Greenspan’s motives seem often about protecting the stock market and investors first. I’m a bit embarrassed that it took me until my third Greenspan book to realize this, but part of why he wants to keep letting the stock market music play as long as possible even as it has the potential to harm the public is that he may see the investor, the banks, the moneymakers, as more important to the economy than the general populace. He may not be wrong, but people who are rich, even self-made like Greenspan, lose touch with money pretty fast. Money becomes abstracted. This might be his exposure to Ayn Rand and being a conservative Republican, but it also is something I see mirrored in the habits of today’s billionaires. Money is an input, a signal, it isn’t the thing that makes the difference in what they eat for dinner or what they wear or how much anxiety they feel every day due to crushing debt.

Perhaps that’s what we want in a Fed Chair, someone who is dispassionate enough to pull the levers without feeling the pain. Sometimes intelligence makes it easier to understand sophisticated financial products, but harder to know that they are bullshit. He completely misses Charles Keating’s S&L chicanery earlier in his career, and he has a tendency to trust bankers as wanting to do the right thing. There’s an implacable logic in “too big to fail” but there’s also an implicit understanding in that that there are plenty of businesses and people that we are just fine letting fail and fall through the cracks.

One thing being an investor has taught me is to invert how I think about the stock market — bad days are buying opportunities, a massive uptick is to be feared rather than celebrated. A portfolio’s numbers aren’t real cash money; they are at any moment either reflecting market exuberance or market despair. The true number lurks underneath. It’s an odd but accurate way to live. The same is true with house prices. We see a Zillow Zestimate and treat it like an actual cash-on-the-barrel price rather than a reflection of overall trends. But even that implies a distance from money, a luxury, to be able to not be desperately anchored to your paycheck and bank account as the decision makers for how you live today.

Whether you have hardly any money or, as Mallaby put it in his other book title, more money than God, leverage appeals. If you have no money, credit or loans help you expand your reach, helping you afford a home or a car or just keep the little ship of you afloat. If you’ve never used your credit card to help you through a difficult month or two, I’m impressed. And yet, too much leverage, whether it’s used by hedge funders or underprepared borrowers, poisons the well of an economy like nothing else. Greenspan knew this, he just tended to ignore it when it suited his purposes, or perhaps when the tide turned, it was too late to stop it. There’s a line in the book that sticks with me: “His identity had fused with the national expectation of prosperity without limit. He was imprisoned by his reputation.”

The truth is, a Fed chair isn’t a wizard. They are just people, and each has his or her own preoccupations, strengths, and weaknesses. Greenspan had his brilliant moments and ones that, in hindsight, seem so wrong-headed. Our problem is when we stop questioning any one person, when we imbue them with too much power, it changes both us and them.

The role of the Fed, its relationship with the executive branch, and with the American public are often set by the Chair. Greenspan’s savvy use of his network of connections as well as his courting of the press, contributed to the breathless attention around the Fed that still continues. Fed Chair Warsh already seems to be pushing away from the hyper-visibility of the Fed and perhaps away from the dual mandate so emphasized by Jerome Powell. The larger task for the country isn’t who should run the Fed but what we expect the Fed to do.