Makers and Takers ─ How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street

Eight years on from the biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008 still remain unlearned—and our financial system is just as vulnerable as ever. Many of us know that our government failed to fix the banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. But what few of us realize is how the misguided financial practices and philosophies that nearly toppled the global financial system have come to infiltrate ALL American businesses, putting us on a collision course for another cataclysmic meltdown.

Drawing on in-depth reporting and exclusive interviews at the highest rungs of Wall Street and Washington, Time assistant managing editor and economic columnist Rana Foroohar shows how the “financialization of America” - the trend by which finance and its way of thinking have come to reign supreme - is perpetuating Wall Street's reign over Main Street, widening the gap between rich and poor, and threatening the future of the American Dream.
Policy makers get caught up in the details of regulating “Too Big To Fail” banks, but the problems in our market system go much broader and deeper than that. Consider that:

· Thanks to 40 years of policy changes and bad decisions, only about 15 % of all the money in our market system actually ends up in the real economy – the rest stays within the closed loop of finance itself.
· The financial sector takes a quarter of all corporate profits in this country while creating only 4 % of American jobs.
· The tax code continues to favor debt over equity, making it easier for companies to hoard cash overseas rather than reinvest it on our shores.
· Our biggest and most profitable corporations are investing more money in stock buybacks than in research and innovation.
· And, still, the majority of the financial regulations promised after the 2008 meltdown have yet come to pass, thanks to cozy relationship between our lawmakers and the country’s wealthiest financiers.

Exploring these forces, which have have led American businesses to favor balancing-sheet engineering over the actual kind and the pursuit of short-term corporate profits over job creation, Foroohar shows how financialization has so gravely harmed our society, and why reversing this trend is of grave importance to us all. Through colorful stories of both "Takers” and "Makers,” she’ll reveal how we change the system for a better and more sustainable shared economic future. 

— Inc.com - The 7 Books That Explain 2016
— Financial Times/McKinsey - Shortlisted for the Business Book of the Year Award 2016
— 800 CEO Read - Longlisted for Business Book of the Year Award 2016
— Financial Times - Best Books of 2016: Economics
— The Atlantic - Best Business Books for Summer 2016
— Success.com - #16 on list of 41 Books to Motivate You to Be Your Best Self

Rana Foroohar was recently named global business columnist and Associate Editor for the Financial Times. She is also CNN’s global economic analyst. 

Prior to joining the FT and CNN, Foroohar was for six years the assistant managing editor in charge of business and economics at TIME, as well as the magazine’s economic columnist. She also spent 13 years at Newsweek, as an economic and foreign affairs editor and a foreign correspondent covering Europe and the Middle East. During that time, she was awarded the German Marshall Fund’s Peter Weitz Prize for transatlantic reporting. She has also received awards and fellowships from institutions such as the Johns Hopkins School of International Affairs and the East West Center.  She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
 
Foroohar graduated in 1992 from Barnard College, Columbia University.  She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer John Sedgwick, and her two children, Darya and Alex.