Flat Broke in the Free Market

Growing up in an African American working-class family in the Midwest Jon Jeter watched the jobs undergirding a community disappear. As a journalist for the Washington Post (twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist) he reported on the freemarket reforms of the IMF and the World Bank which in a single generation created a transnational underclass.Led by the United States nations around the world stopped making things and starting buying them imbibing a risky cocktail of deindustrialization privatization and anti-inflationary monetary policy. Jeter gives the consequences of abstract economic policies a human face and shows how our chickens are coming home to roost in the form of the subprime mortgage scandal the food crisis and the fraying of traditional social bonds (marriage). From Rio de Janeiro to Shanghai to Soweto to Chicagos South Side and Washington DC Jeter shows us how the economic prescriptions of the Washington Consensus have only deepened povertywhile countries like Chile and Venezuela have flouted the conventional wisdom and prospered.