The Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy

Rating:
Summary: Long journey start with a firt step
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Blood Bankers
Review: 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:
Summary: The hidden truth of third world debt
Review: 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.