FT Business Book of the Year

Best business books

All the books longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

Makers and Takers by Rana Foroohar

Makers and Takers

Drawing on in-depth reporting and exclusive interviews at the highest rungs of Wall Street and Washington, Rana Foroohar shows how the ‘financialisation of America’ – the trend by which finance and its way of thinking have come to reign supreme – is perpetuating Wall Street’s reign over Main Street, widening the gap between rich and poor, and threatening the future of the American Dream. — Penguin

Synopsis

Eight years on from the biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008 still remain unlearned–and our financial system is just as vulnerable as ever. Many of us know that our government failed to fix the banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. But what few of us realise is how the misguided financial practices and philosophies that nearly toppled the global financial system have come to infiltrate ALL American businesses, putting us on a collision course for another cataclysmic meltdown.

Drawing on in-depth reporting and exclusive interviews at the highest rungs of Wall Street and Washington, Time assistant managing editor and economic columnist Rana Foroohar shows how the “financialisation of America” – the trend by which finance and its way of thinking have come to reign supreme – is perpetuating Wall Street’s reign over Main Street, widening the gap between rich and poor, and threatening the future of the American Dream.

Policy makers get caught up in the details of regulating “Too Big To Fail” banks, but the problems in our market system go much broader and deeper than that. Exploring these forces, which have have led American businesses to favour balancing-sheet engineering over the actual kind and the pursuit of short-term corporate profits over job creation, Foroohar shows how financialisation has so gravely harmed our society, and why reversing this trend is of grave importance to us all. Through colourful stories of both “Takers” and “Makers,” she’ll reveal how we change the system for a better and more sustainable shared economic future.