[PEN-L:11341] Re: bingo

[MScoleman@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 97-07-12 16:58:05 EDT, you write:

> Most soon discovered there
>  were no secret cabals or overarching schemes for social
>  domination.
Says who?

>   Doug Henwood, ***the middle-aged publisher*** (emphasis added)
This IS a LOW blow.

>of the Left
>  Business Observer newsletter, and the host of a show on
>  geo-politics on WBAI, a New York leftist radio station.
It was nice of him to list your credits, Doug, maybe--maybe you'll pick up
readership and listenship.

> Now
>  Henwood has written Wall Street, a book that amply
>  illustrates his nasty ad hominem streak and overweening
>  intellectual arrogance.
shit, sounds like jealousy to me.

>  Both characteristics were also      [Wall Street Book Cover]
>  central elements in Karl Marx's
>  personality. One wonders whether Henwood acquired his
>  repellent style through natural aptitude or exaggerated hero
>  worship.
Lovely comparison.

>  Whatever the reason, Wall Street is predictable Henwood,
>  with Marxist analysis of the U.S. capital markets.
Well, doug, if you are 'predictable' this means you're widely read.  Is this
true?

>At the
>  end, no surprise, shareholders and ``the creditor-rentier
>  class of the First World and their junior partners in the
>  Third'' are deemed irrelevant, parasitic and disposable,
>  preferably via confisticatory taxation. ``Worker ownership''
>  economies, based on non-market principles, should replace
>  them.
>  Reading loopy polemics like Wall Street should be fun.
>  Regrettably, the book fails to deliver.
Fails to deliver what--loopy politics or fun? If he's going for sarcasm, at
least he should construct his sentences properly.

Seriously, though, I think the review is a good one--it would make me go out
and buy the book just because I disagree with the man's political position.
 I also think that wall street hates criticism and some people will read the
book just to see if you are capable of gathering critics under one umbrella.
maggie coleman mscoleman@xxxxxxx

>
>  The first two of its seven sections constitute 107
>  descriptive pages on U.S. financial markets, products and
>  participants. A lot to squeeze in while gratuitously flaying
>  ideological opponents and showing how expensive and
>  needlessly complex is the U.S financial system. Henwood
>  ignores the plethora of specialized services and
>  intermediaries that have grown up around most industries,
>  not just finance.
>  Henwood's substantive complaints about aggregate
>  financial-transaction expense, excessive turnover,
>  asset-pricing models and leveraged buyouts echo longstanding
>  critiques by, among others, Louis Lowenstein of Columbia
>  University and Warren Buffett.
>
>  Similarly, in his next section, Henwood devotes eight pages
>  to a description of ``a trading week'' complete with
>  ``reflexive-like relationships among financial phenomena,
>  the whole strongly reminiscent of the ``Real Time
>  Experiment'' in George Soros's The Alchemy of Finance.
>
>  Then we're off on a lengthy trek debunking current theories
>  of finance, during which Henwood really bogs down in the
>  fever swamps of lengthy paeans to Marx's visionary genius,
>  magisterial corrections of other Marxist economists, plus
>  occasional odd digressions, such as bashing Rudolf
>  Hilferding, a Social Democratic finance minister during the
>  Weimar Republic.
>
>  Despite 300-plus pages of excoriation, Henwood's disdain for
>  capitalism remains unconvincing. His criticism of American
>  society as atomistic is ironic, given the civic void exposed
>  in socialist states when their totalitarian systems
>  collapse. In addition, while Henwood is at his best and most
>  provocative doing street theater on the cost, waste and
>  pretensions of American financial markets, someone in the
>  U.S. must be doing something right. The U.S. saves 5%-10%
>  less of GDP than other developed countries. Yet starting
>  from the world's highest standard of living, America
>  maintained broadly comparable economic growth despite a
>  lower savings effort. Perhaps the U.S. capital markets,
>  whose aggregate costs are under 1% of GDP, contribute to
>  that success.
>
>  And high turnover rates in securities markets may be
>  wasteful, but they pale into insignificance compared with
>  the useless accumulation of industrial junk and gargantuan
>  deferred environmental costs that socialism begat in the
>  former U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe and China.
>
>  Henwood calls tight money, anti-inflation policies in
>  capitalist countries ``sadomonetarism,'' with former Fed
>  chief Paul Volcker's tightening in the early 'Eighties as
>  the prototype. Yet a 5% peak-to-trough drop in GDP seems
>  weak beer, compared to deliberately starving millions and
>  seizing agricultural ``surpluses'' for industrial
>  development as the Soviet Union did in the early 'Thirties
>  or China did during the Great Leap Forward.
>
>  Antagonistic to economic modernity and paternalistic toward
>  ``workers,'' Wall Street plants itself among those who would
>  welcome the collapse of American prosperity. If the economy
>  turns down sharply, boning up on Henwood will help explain
>  the inspiration for the blizzard of economic regulation
>  initiatives that probably will follow. Until that day
>  arrives, however, save your $22.50.
>
>  PAUL J. ISAAC considers himself a Wall Streeter.
>
>
>
>
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