The Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy
Author: James S. Henry, Bill Bradley, Senator Bill Bradley
List Price: $26.95
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ISBN: 1568582544
Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows (December, 2003)
Sales Rank: 79,612
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
The hidden truth of third world debt
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.
Rating: 5 out of 5
The Blood Bankers
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.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Really interesting new material about Latin America, ME
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.... Similar Products
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