Which handles money better? A casino or Wall Street?

Bad Money' by Kevin Phillips
Which handles money better? A casino or Wall Street? A look at the reckless financing and political decision-making preceding the current economic crisis.

Kevin Phillips' new book, "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism," would be sobering enough if it were the first we'd ever heard from him. When you take into account how often he's been right in the past, this 14th volume in his continuing commentary on the American condition becomes positively alarming.

As a senior strategist for Richard Nixon in 1968, Phillips correctly forecast the coming conservative realignment that ultimately would propel Ronald Reagan into the White House. As a principal architect of the Republicans' "Southern strategy," he correctly foresaw a shift of influence to the "Sunbelt" and to the "new right" -- two phrases he coined. He also envisioned what we call the red state-blue state divide and accurately predicted its geography. Twenty-five years ago, the Wall Street Journal heralded Phillips as "the leading conservative electoral analyst," but since then, he's become disenchanted with the GOP's embrace of evangelical pieties and what he calls dynastic politics and "market triumphalism." Still, he hasn't crossed the aisle and, in "Bad Money," he has a great deal to say about the Democrats' -- particularly the Clinton Democrats' -- complicity in the developing global economic crisis.

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take away quote Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth."