Age of Greed

"Jeff Madrick has written one of those rare, wonderful books that allow us to understand a huge and important historical development that we may not have realized was a coherent and coordinated series of events. While Madrick's account of Alan Greenspan's ideologically driven mistakes alone is worth the price of admission, it is but one course in a feast of wonderful reporting and writing. If you want to know what has happened to your country, read this book."---Robert G. Kaiser, author of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government

"Jeff Madrick's devastating biography of greed is rife with carefully documented cautionary tales of the rich, greedy, and unregulated, which collectively constitute the definitive answer to Milton Friedmanesque laissez-faire economics."---Victor Navasky, author of Kennedy Justice

"Honore de Balzac wrote long ago that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Now in Jeff Madrick's important new book, Age of Greed, we are introduced to some of the best and brightest money changers in the murky world of high finance."---Gay Talese, author of A Writer's Life

"Who's responsible for the laying waste of our economy-making the rich far richer and everyone else economically insecure? Madrick does more than name names. He tells us who did what and how they did it---the ideologues, demagogues, corporate titans, and crooks. A wonderfully insightful but deeply troubling account of the movers and shakers who toppled America."---Robert B. Reich, author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future

"The economic disaster of 2008 was not an accident of God but a man-made event. In writing about the financiers, bankers, brokers, free-market philosophers, hedge fund managers, government officials who together engineered the fundamental and profound---almost revolutionary---shift in the American economy that culminated in the events of 2008, Jeff Madrick's provides his readers with a new and startling account of recent economic history. The individual chapters are riveting, but the genius of this book is that Madrick's whole is even greater the sum of its magnificent parts. This is a book that bears reading by everyone with an inter in the American economy and the American future."---David Nasaw, author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst

Jeff Madrick is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, a former economics columnist for The New York Times, and editor of Challenge magazine. He is an adjunct professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School. His previous books include The End of Affluence and Taking America, and he has written for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Institutional Investor, The Nation, and The American Prospect. He lives in New York City.