Donwload a book on Wall Street free or buy for about a thousand dollars at Amazon

Doug Henwood published a book called Wall Street in 1997. Published by Verso it is now out of print. Of course there are used copies at Amazon. Something perhaps went awry with Amazon pricing and for a short while Wall Street was priced as if a rare book!

Doug Henwood who edits the Left Business Observer published Wall Street in hardcover in 1997 and in paperback in 1998. The publisher Verso chose not to reprint the book and so when stock was all sold the rights reverted to Henwood in March of 2005.
Henwood chose to make Wall Street available for download free--although he will not turn down donations! The download site is here.
Used copies of the book are offered on Amazon. As this screenshot shows a copy was on offer the other day for just under one thousand dollars. Usually copies can be obtained for well under one hundred dollars. I checked just recently and all were under one hundred even a hard copy. While someone may actually have been asking nearly one thousand, there have been pricing problems from time to time at Amazon.
There is a review of Henwood's book at this site. by Justin Fox. Fox is editorial director of the Harvard Business Review group. He also authored a book that has many of the same themes and is similar in some ways to Henwood's book called The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk Reward and Delusion on Wall Street.
Fox notes that Henwood's book published far back in 1997 set out many criticisms that have been made against Wall Street since 2008. Henwood talked about such taboo matters as the link between the growth of the financial sector and the growth in income inequality. He talked also of financial markets tending to be naturally unstable rather than tending towards stability.
Henwood noted through analysis that shareholders in the aggregate take more money from U.S. corporations than they invest. Actually I do not find that surprising. After all why would shareholders put money into companies except to get more money out. However, I suppose the point Henwood is making is that people who purchase shares and provide the capital for companies rather than reinvesting all that money simply consume more than they put back in. If as Henwood suggests workers ran corporations other stakeholders would benefit rather than being exploited to enhance shareholders take from their investments.
Fox points out that Henwood was criticizing Wall Street at a time when mainstream analysts tended to lavish praise on Wall Street dominated by share-holders. No one much listened to Henwood then. The book soon went out of print but Fox suggests the book is very much worth reading. So take your choice. Download it for free or perhaps the price has dwindled to a dollar on Amazon.
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U.S.economy , profit rates, investment and internal funds

In a recent post Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer provides an interesting analysis of the relationship between profit and investment. Henwood includes onegraph that shows profit rates from the nineteen fifties until now and another that shows the relationship between internal funds and capital investments over the same time period. Both graphs are for non-financial institutions.

Until 2011 the rate of profits have been rising during the recovery. But they perhaps have peaked now. Economic recovery seems to be slow in the U.S. Henwood notes that neo liberal policies were successful in restoring profit rates close to what they had been earlier.

One of Henwood's graphs is interesting because it shows that even though there is plenty of cash to invest with strong corporate cash flows, companies are investing at a rate that one would expect during low profit levels periods even though levels are still high.

In my view, one of the main reasons for the lack of investment is the considerable uncertainty about the economic future. In this situation companies simply will not take the risk of investing. They will wait until the future is more certain and promising. Even though actual profit rates are high and many companies are doing quite well even during this period of low growth, the future is just too uncertain and so investment lags even though the present rate of return on capital is high.

Crisis of A Gilded Age.

This is an article by Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer. He notes the manner in which the gap between rich and poor has increased with deregulation. People are rightly angry at the attempt now to bail out Wall Street while doing little or nothing to address the problems of the middle class and poor. Certainly some responsibility lies with people who took out mortgages when they should have known they could not finance them but the system was glad to mislead them and their purchases were part of the boom that is now bust.


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081013/henwoodCrisis of a Gilded Age
By Doug Henwood
It looks like someday finally arrived.For the past two or three decades skeptics watched as deregulated finance got ever more reckless, as the gap between rich and poor widened to a chasm not seen since the turn of the last century, and they said, "Someday there's going to be hell to pay for all this." But despite a few nasty hiccups every few years--the 1987 stock market crash, the savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s, the Mexican and Asian financial crises of the mid-1990s, the dot-com bust of the early 2000s--somehow the economy regained its footing for another game of chicken. Has its luck finally run out?It might seem odd to link the current financial crisis with the long- term polarization of incomes, but in fact the two are deeply connected. During the housing bubble, people borrowed heavily not only to buy houses (whose prices were rising out of reach of their incomes) but also to compensate for the weakest job and income growth of any expansion since the end of World War II. Between 2001 and 2007, homeowners withdrew almost $5 trillion in cash from their houses, either by borrowing against their equity or pocketing the proceeds of sales; such equity withdrawals, as they're called, accounted for 30 percent of the growth in consumption over that six-year period. That extra lift disguised the labor market's underlying weakness; without it, the 2001 recession might never have ended.But that round of borrowing only extended one that had begun in the early 1980s. At first it was credit cards, but when the housing boom really got going around 2001, the mortgage market took the lead. Now households are up to their ears in debt, and the credit markets are broken.Borrowing is only one side of the story. As incomes polarized, America's rich and the financial institutions that serve them found their portfolios bulging with cash in need of a profitable investment outlet, and one of the outlets they found was lending to those below them on the income ladder. (That's one of several places where all the cash that funded the credit card and mortgage borrowing came from.) They also poured their money into hedge funds, private equity funds and just plain old stocks and bonds. That twenty-five-year gusher of cash led to an enormous expansion in the financial markets. Total financial assets of all kinds (stocks, bonds, everything) averaged around 440 percent of GDP from the early 1950s through the late 1970s. They grew steadily, breaking 600 percent in 1990 and 1,000 percent by 2007. With a few notorious interruptions, it looked like Wall Street had entered a utopia: an eternal bull market. Regulators stopped regulating and auditors looked the other way as financial practices lost all traces of prudence. No figure embodies that negligence better than Alan Greenspan, who as chair of the Federal Reserve dropped the propensity to caution and worry characteristic of the central banking profession and instead cheered the markets onward. As he said many times in the 1990s and early 2000s, who was he, a mere mortal, to second-guess the collective wisdom of the markets? He seemed to have no sense that markets embody no collective wisdom and often act with all the careful consideration of a mob.So while the proximate cause, as the lawyers say, of the current financial crisis is the bursting of the housing bubble and the souring of so much of the mortgage debt that financed it, that's really only part of a much larger story. And while it's inevitable that the government is going to have to spend hundreds of billions to repair the damage over the next few years, there's a lot more that needs to be done over the longer term.This is the point where it's irresistibly tempting to call for a re- regulation of finance. And that is sorely needed. But we also need to remember why finance, like many other areas of economic life, was deregulated starting in the 1970s. From the point of view of the elite, corporate profits were too low, workers were too demanding and the hand of government was too heavy. Deregulation was part of a broad assault to make the economy more "flexible," which translated into stagnant to declining wages and rising job insecurity for most Americans. And the medicine worked, from the elites' point of view. Corporate profitability rose dramatically from the early 1980s until sometime last year. The polarization of incomes wasn't an unwanted side effect of the medicine--it was part of the cure.Although we're hearing a lot now about how the Reagan era is over and the era of big government is back, an expanded government isn't likely to do much more than rescue a failing financial system (in addition to the more familiar pursuits of waging war and jailing people). Nothing more humane will be pursued without a far more energized populace than we have. After this financial crisis and the likely bailout, it looks impossible to go back to the status quo ante--but we don't seem ready to move on to something appealingly new yet, either.___________________________________