Why Save the Bankers?: And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis

Piketty, a French economist, applies the critique developed in his celebrated Capital in the Twenty-First Century to recent headlines in this punchy collection of essays. The short pieces, written for the newspaper Liberation, cover developments since the 2008 financial collapse: the efforts by the Fed and the European Central Bank (ECB) to stabilize Western banks, the advent of public debt crises in southern Europe, and the 2015 election of Greece's Syriza party. He hammers on several themes: the deepening inequality between workers with stagnating wages and super-rich executives and rentiers, the unfairness of raising taxes on low-income wage-earners while cutting taxes on capital incomes of the rich (Liliane Bettencourt, France's richest woman, is a frequent target for the minuscule tax she pays on her %E2%82%AC15 billion fortune), the folly of ECB austerity policies that choke off growth and saddle governments with unpayable debt, and the need for European Union%E2%80%93wide budget and tax policies to accompany the common euro currency. Piketty, the French Paul Krugman, has an extraordinary knack for translating the complexities of central bank finance, tax policy, regulation, and macroeconomics into lucid, down-to-earth language enriched by shrewd historical and cultural insights. This is a compelling challenge to economic orthodoxy. (Apr.)