The Boom and the Bubble: The U.S. in the World Economy

Robert Brenner takes the long view, and the horizon isn't rosy. The stock market bubble of the '90s, he believes, can only be understood in the larger context of not only the long downturn that preceded it in the world economy between 1973 and 1995, but also of the forces that led to that downturn. This book offers a sober account of U.S. interactions with those forces: Japan and Germany, the Federal Reserve, economic crises in East Asia and Latin America. As the author of two previous books on market turbulence and a professor of history at UCLA as well as director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History there, Brenner brings much authority but not much optimism to a difficult topic. "It is my conviction, simply stated, that the problems that confront the world capitalist economy today, and thus the U.S. economy, are deep-seated, and subject to no quick fixes," he writes.