Apart from last weekend’s review in the New York Times, it’s fair to say there hasn’t been a giant load of critical appraisal of my book in the mainstream press. I’ve had a lot of publicity — numerous radio interviews, TV appearances, and excerpts on various high-profile web sites — and all that has been great. But until recently I was hankering to have the book legitimized by the stamp of a respected reviewer. I almost didn’t care whether the reviewer loved or hated it. I just wanted someone to care enough about it to share their opinion. (Authors who tell you they don’t care about reviews are lying.)

I say “until recently” not because the rare honor of a NY Times review has come as a pick-me-up (it has), but because I’ve also started to take heart from the feedback the book is getting from the people who, I now realize, are the most important critics: ordinary readers. These are the people the book was designed to reach. And consistently they are turning up unsolicited on Amazon’s web site to rave about how it has taught them something. To know that you have touched something in people’s lives through your writing is a wonderful feeling. It’s the only reason, really, to write.

There are now 33 reviews on the Amazon site, 28 of which gave The Unfair Trade either four or five stars. Few, however, have captured the essence of what I was trying to achieve as much as the latest one from, it so happens, a Lutheran Pastor.

Here’s what Bror. Erickson had to say:

If you are like me, you try to read books on finances every once in awhile, maybe one or two a year. You try to be as responsible as you can with your income, and find yourself struggling from time to time, and wondering how it is all going to work out. If you are like me, you also find books on finance to be extremely boring and hard to read, not understand, just hard to read, perhaps painful. This book is an exception to that rule. It may not help you balance your check book, but it explains why you are having a harder time doing that than your parents did. And the book is a fascinating and easy read.
Michael Casey takes you one by one into the lives of people who have been affected by the Global Economy, and then shows how and why this has effected you. He isn’t out trying to find victims, and rant about banks and rich people either. He shows why people make the decisions they do when they do. And how it is that the decision makes sense, and then why these decisions become so destructive. It’s a balanced book that isn’t going to sell you on state controls, but isn’t necessarily going to say free markets is the answer either. In the end, you get a much deeper understanding of what is happening to our economy, where it is going than one might watching any news channel on T.V. He shows how we are all tied together for good or bad, and perhaps why it is we can’t ignore what is happening in other parts of the world. It is a fascinating read for anyone that has any interest in understanding how globalization works.

Brother Erickson, I’m glad my book got through to you. Thank you for making my day.

In a full-length review by Tyler Cowen, The Unfair Trade gets equal billing with Dan Gross’s Better, Stronger, Faster, which has a rather more optimistic take on America’s future than my book does. It’s a solid, thought-provoking review, one that I really shouldn’t complain about. Just having had both of my books reviewed by The New York Times is a huge honor.  Having them reviewed intelligently in each case has been an added bonus!

Most importantly, Cowen praised both our books’ strongest points: their in-depth reporting. (Gross, like me, is a journalist. Ironically, it’s not the first pairing of our books. The first was made by Reuters’ Breaking Views editor Rob Cox in a video interview/debate in which he got us to present our countervailing glass half full/half empty takes on the economy.) It’s satisfying that Cowen picked up on the reporting in my book, because I that’s the part of it — the on-the-ground journalism and storytelling — that I most want to resonate with people. I  believe it’s the only way to bring something as seemingly inaccessible as global finance to the ordinary reader.

But here’s my beef with the review: Cowen, an economist and blogger,  spends plenty of time outlining his own take on what’s wrong (or right) with the global economy and not a lot detailing with the contents of either of our books. Yet, at times, his take on the global economy, presented supposedly in contrast to mine, almost seemed drawn from my own reporting: “Even the economic rise of China, we should remember, is not a sure thing: the country faces problems from real estate bubbles, provincial debts, widespread corruption, urban-rural disparities and the absence of a clear path to democracy.” (See: Chapter 3, The Unfair Trade).

Although it’s tempting to take issue with his simplification of my thesis and the critique on those grounds, his conclusions are safely unassailable. In Cowen’s final analysis, he is absolutely right:  our economic future is indeed “too messy, and too independent of any one easily communicated mood, slogan or title, to be encapsulated in a single book.” I would simply add that that very same complicated reality is a direct function of the hyper-globalized economic experience of our times. And while I don’t claim to have the only interpretation on how that globalized system affects ordinary lives, I stand by the claim that mine is the only book on the financial crisis that tries to bring all the many elements of the global imbalances problem into the postmortem on the crisis. It’s also the only one (through its storytelling) to put an international human face on the problem.  I hope that The Unfair Trade will be remembered as having helped, in however small a way, to open ordinary people’s eyes (especially Americans) to the global forces at work in their economy.

We need a new internationalism, one that can rise to the demands of a globalized financial system in which powerful elites take advantage of our myopic nationalistic tendencies. It’s the only way to create a more balanced global playing field and to undo the biases in a lopsided, unbalanced economy.  If everyone simply dismisses all attempts to achieve that goal as naive and politically impossible, we must resign ourselves to more crises, political turmoil and social tension.

 

 

 

 

So, it has been a whirlwind past few days since the book launched on Tuesday. In the process this blog has been relegated to the back of the list.  (I’m sure that my social media advisers – you know who you are – would tell me I was getting my priorities backwards and that, at times like, it’s even more important to have a conversation with my readers.  Well, I hear you, but a man needs to sleep some time.)

Anyway, here’s what has happened.

The book went on sale on Tuesday, a day that kicked off at 7:30 am with a spot on the very fine MSNBC morning news show, Morning Joe. (The way morning news should be – not saccharine or superficial but newsy and unafraid to dig into issues while still managing to have some fun.) I was also very lucky to be on set with Gillian Tett, the Financial Times’ super smart US Managing Editor, who was able to engage in a rich discussion about what’s wrong with our global financial system. And the Morning Joe crew was kind enough to run an excerpt from The Unfair Trade on their site. I LIKE these people.

Watch the clip and read the transcript from the show here:

 

Today I had a video interview at TheStreet.com. (Clip coming.). And an interview with George Jarkesy of the Wall Street Journal Radio Network and  CRN 5.

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Here’s a clip from my session with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and others on the set of Morning Joe today. Nice to be able to take the problems of the global economy to the masses.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

With the book launch officially kicking off on Tuesday, May 29, the fun begins.

• Starts off with a bang: I’m on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show at 7:30 am Tuesday morning.
• Then, at 10:30 am or thereabouts, the first of three interviews with my colleague Paul Vigna on WSJ’s Markets Hub show
• On Wednesday, interviews with a couple of big online finance web sites (more details later), followed by a live-to-air interview for the George Jarkesky radiod show.
• On Thursday morning, we run an excerpt on wsj.com and hold the second interview on Markets Hub, complete with a  video to accompany the excerpt.
• On Thursday at 1:30 pm, a radio interview with nationally syndicated host Stu Tayler.
• Friday, 11 am. Live interview with Mike McKee on Bloomberg Radio

More events are in the works too. Details later.

As Greece’s two-and-half-year crisis slides toward its inevitable climax, financial leaders in Europe are finally acknowledging that this once unspeakable conclusion, the one they have all been working to avoid, could indeed happen. The idea that Greece will have to rid itself of the euro, the currency in which its citizens have transacted and saved for the past twelve years, is a now an official reality.

So, now, as they gingerly extract themselves from a state of collective denial, those with the most to lose from the most extreme result – those of the Greek establishment – are doing so in the most alarming fashion possible. Scaring the hell out of those who have Greece’s future in their hands, especially Radical Left leader Alexis Tsipras and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, might be the last chance they have for keeping Greece in the monetary union and avoiding a meltdown.

Fear is becoming Greece’s best export. See my column from last week. WSJ version here. Subscription free version at MarketWatch here.

things are moving along.

The first “vine” review appeared on Amazon. A nice one.

Had a great roundtable discussion about my book with a brains trust of invitees to the prestigious Council of Foreign Relations in Washington on Tuesday. Topic: The Middle Class in an Age of Global Finance. Very smart questions. A bit daunting. Felt like I was defending a dissertation. But extremely fruitful and seemingly a positive response.

And some other big news! Aussie rights to the book have been sold to the renowned Scribe publishing house in Melbourne. Very happy to have the book on sale so soon in my home country.

Just as exciting and delightfully quirky is the fact that, technically, the first deal for foreign rights received on the book is from none other than Greece! (Psichogios Publications). I think it’s entirely appropriate that a country that has become the poster child for a global financial system in which the excesses of a few have done profound harm to the majority should be the first to show interest in a book that explains how we got into that predicament.

 

One of the reasons why mainstream middle and working class people are the ones who are most harmed whenever there’s a financial crisis is that they don’t understand what’s happening until it’s too late. By then the “smart money”–the investment bankers, the hedge funds, the savvy day traders–has already dump their securities and run,” leaving the “not quite as smart money” holding the bag.  And one of the reasons for that is that regular Joes treat financial news as something that’s just too hard to understand and of little relevance to their daily life.

For that I blame my profession. We financial journalists spend so much time writing about what a certain set of economic or financial developments mean for investors, and by that we mean either the individual or institutional investor who consciously and actively manages a portfolio. Sure, we try to make the article clear and put it in a “lay person’s” language, but our focus is still very narrow. We don’t really write about what these developments mean for the great majority of people who let their pension funds roll along with minimal intervention. Yet in so many ways — in their job prospects, their home prices, their retirement outlook — these people’s lives are profoundly affected by what happens in the financial world.  Continue reading…

If my writings suggest to you that I’m a little obsessed with the giant, distorting role that China plays in the global economy, then, guilty as charged.

It’s not that I blame China for the world’s ills per se. After all, no one is forcing the debt-laden nations of the industrialized world to borrow money from the Asian giant with its mountain of currency reserves. Our own addiction to excess debt and leveraged growth is as much as a cause of our troubles as China’s insistence on polices that drive its citizens into a loss-making savings habit.

Nonetheless, it is remarkable how frequently you discover China’s footprint amid the rubble of the world’s financial crises. (Hence the fact that “The Rise of China” constitutes the first half of my book.)

So, naturally, I turned once again to this colossal global investment manager in a column today about the euro, the currency that refuses to fall even when it sits at the center of a global financial storm.

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