Customer Reviews

The Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We have heard much about the crisis of third world debt and what to do about it from liberal ("forgive the debt") and right-wing ("bankrupt the suckers") commentators. James Henry asks a more fundamental question, where did the money go? Why is there so little to show for the more than $2.7 trillion of debt, aid, and investment made available to the developing world since the 1970s? One answer is that it was not spent but stolen and wasted, maybe as little as one-third of it ending up on the ground. Much of the rest has gone to provide the political elites of recipient countries with retirement homes in pleasant places.

Henry, a lawyer and economist by training and an investigative journalist by avocation, has been working on this story since the late 1980s. He travelled to more than 50 countries in pursuit of it and his book contains original, first-hand accounts of decades of unscrupulous financial behavior in the Philippines, Brazil, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Mexico.

What started off as an economist's enquiry into the paradox of third world debt has ended up as an indictment of the first world corporations that helped to create it. Henry tells how many of the world's leading banks and financial groups have, often with the complicity of their governments and supranational institutions, created and fuelled the new high-growth global markets for dirty debt, capital flight, money laundering, tax evasion, corruption, illicit weapons traffic, and other new transnational forms of dubious economic activity.

This is an essential book. Corruption is the scandal of third world debt. Attempts to relieve it must include the means to prevent its happening again.

I'm a Latin American scholar. Henry's well-written book manages to get below the surface, and deliver some amazing new revelations about Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, in particular. I was also interested to find out exactly where Paraguay's General Stroessner, the Phillipines' Marcos, Pakistan's Bhutto, Zaire's Mobutu, and quite a few other Third World thugs kept their foreign loot -- and not only in Switzerland! Not easy reading, but it will definitely change your perspective on the global economy....

"The Blood Bankers" is an important contribution to our understanding of global financial instability. Most often, liberalized (legitimate) capital markets, international trade, state power, and international regulatory institutions are cited as the causes of destabilization. However, J. Henry allows us to look behind these forces and bodies to see how the liberalization of the global economy has unleashed illicit and/ or immoral financial forces, often acting through otherwise legitimate enterprises. Thus, "The Blood Bankers" gives us another level of understanding and critique of the agents of globalization. Without understanding the underground players, it would be impossible to fully understand the instability of modern international markets.

Major U.S. banks have knowingly dealt with the corrupt elites of the world's developing countries.
They have harbored capital flight from wealthy investors who had lost confidence in their country.
They have extended loans to corrupt industrialists, who promptly skimmed the profits and, through their political connections, convinced the national governments to guarantee the loans, placing the burden on the backs of the poor.
They have lent money to violently repressive military dictators.
They have accepted bribes; they have offered bribes; they have turned a blind eye to untold human suffering.

Blood Bankers sets out to answer the question, "What has happened that over the last 30 years the industrialized countries of the world have loaned $3 trillion ($3,000,000,000,000) -ostensibly for the benefit of the underdeveloped countries of the world- and, without question, the latter are substantially worse off than they were 30 years ago?" Very often the effects that he reports are not marginal failures, but catastrophic results, that he rigorously illustrates in the book. Worse, the failures are not a collection of accidents, scattered ethical failures, or the like.

Jim's book is a treasure of facts and speculative plots for any citizen of the world seriously concerned with exploring and then grounding his or her ethical claims for a different global convivencia - way of being together and engaging with the others in our daily lives-. The book brings, through a rich and engaging set of well-researched stories, a context for understanding the role played by a system of major institutions in crafting the failures and financial scandals that often appear as scattered and disconnected news in the media. He draws a clear picture of a sustained pattern of behaviors, practices, interpretations, institutionalized systems and ways of thinking and working that are embedded in worldwide economic institutions, investment banks, governments, the great construction companies of the world, major equipments vendors, that create exactly the right situation for growing the behaviors that bring and sustain these results.

The book portrait the global machinery of nihilism were a dollar from dictator or a dollar from a legitimate president, a dollar from a organ trafficker or a dollar from a religious order, a dollar from the right or the left worth the same, and share the very same benefit of being tax free, secretly concealed, flying capital. The book shows the extent of a pervasive criminal side in America's claim of decency, fair practices, and humanitarian generosity - a kind of decency that is indecent and needs to be reinvented-

Henry's voice seams to collide with some main stream voices. April 2004 HBR call in its front-page "Play to Win" through "hardball" strategies -G.Stalk, R.Lachenauer-. One of the five strategies -that in synthesis seams to be a call for a more predatory style- said " The hardball player venture closer to the boundary, whether establish by law or social conventions, than competitors will ever dare (...) Keep in mind, though, that a legal standard is often less than crystal clear. By aggressively pushing the limits of existing regulations, a hardball player can sometimes win tremendous competitive advantages." How we could bring business decency out of this business ethic?, What is missing in the stablished design of the game?

In calling for change in the way this machinery works, Jim defines the scope of a global task that is of the first order, and ultimately, unavoidable. This is a very bold piece of research denied by meanstream media and major political debates.

The Blood Bankers:Tales from the Global Underground Economy is a non-fiction financial thriller/whodunit that illuminates the sordid, self-serving, elitist international money trail and the greedy creatures who travel shamelessly on it. Mr. Henry courageously lifts the veil of monetary indecency and carefully guarded fiscal secrecy as he takes the reader on an insider's guided tour of global corruption and greed. Truth is indeed, stranger than fiction and The Blood Bankers is a shocking account of unbridled greed, run wild in plain sight around the world. It features a virtual perp walk of duplicitous international bankers, beyond-corrupt politicans and heads of state, and a whole supporting cast of money launderers, corporate con men and underworld predators. If you're ready to lose your intellectual virginity, read this book. The world will never look the same.

This book is an eye-opening account of the financial chicanery that lay behind countless poorly planned, badly executed, over-priced and economically unviable development projects that were undertaken in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Henry exposes the role played by leading international financial institutions in fueling the growth of dubious forms of transnational economic activity and shows how their behavior has been tolerated and even encouraged by the IMF, the World Bank and the US Treasury. He also sheds light on the influence that international financial interests have had on political developments in the third world - from the overthrow of Allende's elected government in Chile and the funding provided to Nicaragua's Contra rebels, to the support of thieving dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, General Somoza and Carlos Salinas, just to mention a few.

For anyone wishing to get a clear and concise walk through the back-door dealings of International Banking, in specific what it has done to consistently derail and sabotage emerging financial markets, this is a must read.

The book hinges on true and methodical investigative journalism (sadly, a talent in these precarious times often more feared than revered), and its revelations take you far beyond whatever information has been garnered from the print media's attempts to unravel the blatant crime behind the Third World Debt Crisis.

Whether it be an account of what essentially killed the revolution in Nicaragua, the insane excesses of Imelda Marcos, or the twisted money trail leading to Sadam's WMDs, Mr. Henry will not disappoint in his efforts to reveal how we got ourselves into the Emerging Markets debacle, and what this has to say about the growing worldwide terrorism directed at the West.

Based on the material presented in this book it is 5 Stars. Based on the fact that the author fails to connect the dots, 3 Stars. So, I gave the book 4 Stars.

The author seems to be stumped by why all the loans to underdeveloped countries have not resulted in greater wealth and improvements. Well, maybe that wasn't the plan in the first place. For all the corrupt projects and statistics the author reveals, he seems extremely naïve to the reality of the situation.

if you want to read about corruption, how the U.S. taxpayers are getting screwed and speculate on where all the loan money went, this is the book. But if you want to know how the system is structured to achieve exactly what is going on in all these debt-ridden countries and why all the projects are colossal over-budget failures, read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man." What is happening over and over in all these countries is not an accident. It is a plan by the CIA, IMF, World Bank and others to exploit these countries in what can be considered transnational colonialism.

The same players are always involved, just the name of the country is changed. But the author can't seem to connect the dots... or he just doesn't want to admit that there is a conspiracy going on. Does the author believe it is a coincidence that the heads of some of these institutions later became head of the CIA or other intelligence agencies?

An Amazing read! I didn't know what I never knew! After reading this book twice, I realize that International Bankers of all varieties dominate the buisness world and are at fault for irresponsible lending to many 'developing' nations. A result of which is massive poverty and wealth inequality througout the world.
A timely and revealing look at the origins of the Iraq war are an excellent reminder of power of these wealthy few.

Everyone should buy this book.