6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Popes and Bankers, expect the unexpected, March 27, 2010
This review is from: Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG (Paperback)
One of the things Mr. Cashill is known for is illuminating the true circumstances around events which others have spun to produce a desired outcome. Reading his retelling of these stories has the effect of upending much of what you thought you knew.
In this particular book he takes the time period from Aristotle to present day and successfully strings together the intriguing stories into a narrative that was a joy to read.
What I found particularly interesting were the historical developments related to anti-Semitism; beginning with the role of philosophers, theologians, and institutions trying to grapple with the issue of profit making from loans(rather than from producing goods) and their pronouncements regarding the morality of this activity, contrasted with those such as Marx who would find useful the negative associations related to the the success of Jews in European finance "huckstering" to support their agendas.
The book does a very good job of explaining the development of credit dependency and the complex financial products brought into being without making your eyes glaze over. In fact, it's quite fascinating.
It is not at all a dark view of history, but a web of human action covering a range of motivations from the desire to create a just and moral society to the expansion of wealth for all to the exploitation for personal gain or ideological purpose. And the effect is kind of heart wrenching. There are wonderful surprises throughout which bring a smile to your face, such as Institutes having been written by John Calvin at age 26.
Not to be missed.
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25 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A great read, but quite an ax to grind, May 13, 2010
This review is from: Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG (Paperback)
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The writing here is sharp and witty, with almost every paragraph ending in some sort of a zinger, often connecting ancient history to some current event. And the scope and depth of the cultural history included here is astonishing, from a synopsis of The Inferno and The Merchant of Venice to paraphrases of the latest financial best-sellers, with some Flannery O'Connor thrown in for good measure. The writer is obviously a talented and erudite man.
The first thing that puzzled me, however, is that this book is published by Thomas Nelson, mainly known as a Bible publisher based in Nashville. Huh, that's odd. And then the book begins with an anecdote about a woman who defaults on her over-priced mortgage, the punch line of which is that her problem is that she is a prodigal.
The history of debt and credit then is undertaken, and the point is that both Judaism and Catholicism, as well as much of secular ancient thought, considered money-lending to be a serious sin. The sin of usury was roundly condemned, and it meant not the charging of excessive interest, but the charging of interest at all. In its place, the rich were recommended to give generously to the poor, not to entrap them in pay day loans.
While this point comes across loud and clear throughout the historical section of the book (and while virtually no mention is made of any ancient moral precepts condemning the poor for trying to scrape by through borrowing money), the author strains to make the point that it is the fault of greedy borrowers, rather than greedy lenders, that is really the problem that tanked the economy.
His history of the US economy may be considered somewhat less than objective, since Murray Rothbard is his primary source. For those who don't check their footnotes, Rothbard is on the radical fringe of libertarianism and the free the market movement.
Further, towards the end of the book, the author turns his attention to proving that it was the government that forced poor little bank and finance companies to give out liar loans to prodigal poor people, and he puts particular emphasis on the evils of selling homes to single moms (whose very existence is a result, in his view, of a moral failure) and the concomitant evil of the government insisting that banks not discriminate on the basis of race in their mortgage lending. (He laughs off the idea that lenders would ever actually discriminate.)
So despite setting up the moral background that condemns usurious lenders, he comes down hardest against borrowers, whom he states are not victims of anything, but rather sinners.
The idea that Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were the real victims, pushed into bankruptcy by excessive government regulation, is pretty hard to swallow, no matter how many biblical references and anecdotes from Dante you throw in (and curiously, those references and anecdotes actually point the finger at the lenders as the evil-doers, so the whole argument seems off-base.)
The author heaps particular scorn on events in California, with the tired but handy image of California as a particularly weird place where any sort of nonsense might be expected to happen. He laughably blames high real estate prices in places like Santa Monica on what he calls eco-prissiness. If it weren't for all those fussy laws about things like, oh I don't know, maybe earthquake safety? there would be more houses built in Santa Monica, thus driving down the prices so that virtuous 2-parent families could afford them. Never mind the fact that California actually over-built in inland cities like Stockton, which crashed bad. And he claims that the reason people couldn't read their loan documents is that there were so many government regulations that the stack of paperwork just got too high.
If you seriously believe that it was no-fault divorced laws in California, creating hordes of prodigal single moms who then buy houses they can't afford, in league with eco-sissies who make too many rules about where houses can be built, who just crashed our economy, then this book will confirm your biases.
If you suspect that the story might have more to do with a lack of government regulation, rather than an excess of it, and trade policies which created lower salaries in the US and cash excesses in China, you might want to get your history of credit markets elsewhere.
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