American households have a debt problem. The problem is not, as often claimed, that Americans recklessly take on too much debt. The problem is that US debt policies have no basis in reality. Weaving together the histories and trends of US debt policy with her own family story, Chrystin Ondersma debunks the myths that have long governed debt policy, like the belief that debt leads to prosperity or the claim that bad debt is the result of bad choices, both of which nest in the overarching myth of a free market unhindered by government interference and accessible to all. In Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice (U California Press, 2024), Ondersma offers a compelling, flexible, and reality-based taxonomy rooted in the internationally recognized principle of human dignity. Ondersma's new categories of debt--grounded in abolitionist principles--revolutionize how policymakers are able to think about debt, which will in turn revolutionize the American debt landscape itself.Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Larry Summers, Harvard economics professor and 71st US Secretary of the Treasury, joins the podcast for an in-depth discussion of his career at the highest levels of academic economics, economic policy, university leadership, and corporate America.Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

In recent years, government agencies around the world have been forced to consider the role of competition law and policy in addressing various crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial collapse. There is no easy formula that a competition agency can apply to determine the appropriate response to a crisis; indeed, there is substantial debate about the issue. One common criticism of competition law and policy is that usually it is too inflexible to deal with a crisis, prohibiting an adequate response to economic and industrial shocks. Bruce Wardhaugh's Competition Law in Crisis: The Antitrust Response to Economic Shocks (Cambridge UP, 2022) challenges this notion by examining competition responses to crises past and present. With an analysis that spans the response of UK and EU competition authorities to the economic and commercial fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential responses to the climate crisis, Professor Wardhaugh argues that relaxing competition law is precisely the wrong response. The rigidity of competition rules in the UK and EU has both normative and positive implications for not just the methodology used in competition analysis, but also the role of competition law within the legal order of both jurisdictions.Mark Niefer is a lawyer and economist who has served the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in a variety of key roles over the last 25+ years. He presently is an International Advisor at the Antitrust Division, focused on digital market issues; he also is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School - George Mason University, where he teaches an advanced antitrust seminar on mergers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

We are on the verge of a major paradigm shift for investors in the U.S. stock market. Dividend-focused stock investing has been receding in popularity for more than three decades in the U.S.; once the dominant investment style, it is now a boutique approach. That is about to change.Daniel Peris' book The Ownership Dividend: The Coming Paradigm Shift in the U.S. Stock Market (Routledge, 2024) explains how and why the stock market drifted away from a mostly cash-based returns system to one almost completely driven by near-term share price movements. It details why the exceptional forces behind that shift―notably the 40-year drop in interest rates and the rise of buybacks―are now substantially exhausted. As a result, the U.S. market is poised for a return to the more typical business-like relationships observed in the private sector and in other mature markets around the world. While many market participants have profited from and become used to the way things have been in recent decades, savvy individual investors, financial advisors, and even institutional portfolio managers will want to position themselves to benefit from the reversion to cash-based investment relationships in the years ahead.This is a must-read book for financial advisors, institutional consultants, as well as engaged individual investors.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His "History and Investing" blog and "Keep Calm & Carry On Investing" podcast are here.John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, investment management, and corporate strategy. He is an independent director on 9 mutual fund boards. Mr. Emrich has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma. Email: john@ktdpod.com. LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Over the past decade, many of the world’s biggest companies have found themselves embroiled in legal disputes over corruption, fraud, environmental damage, tax evasion, or sanction violations. Corporations including Volkswagen, BP, and Credit Suisse have paid record-breaking fines. Many critics of globalisation and corporate impunity cheer this turn toward accountability. Others, however, question American dominance in legal battles that seem to impose domestic legal norms beyond national boundaries. In Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Cornelia Woll examines the politics of American corporate criminal law’s extraterritorial reach. As governments abroad seek to respond to US law enforcement actions against their companies, they turn to flexible legal instruments that allow prosecutors to settle a case rather than bring it to court. With her analysis of the international and domestic politics of law enforcement targeting big business, Woll traces the rise of what she calls “negotiated corporate justice” in global markets.Woll charts the path to this shift through case studies of geopolitical tensions and accusations of “economic lawfare,” pitting the United States against the European Union, China, and Japan. She then examines the reactions to the new legal landscape, describing institutional changes in the common law countries of the United Kingdom and Canada and the civil law countries of France, Brazil, and Germany. Through an insightful interdisciplinary analysis of how the prosecution of corporate crime has evolved in the twenty-first century, Dr. Woll demonstrates the profound transformation of the relationship between states and private actors in world markets, showing that law is part of economic statecraft in the connected global economy.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Trying to follow the key macroeconomic debates that are swirling around DC, CNBC, the WSJ and the NYT? If you are but don't want to go back to graduate school or re-open your college macroeconomics textbook, John Quiggin has a solution. His Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly (Princeton University Press, 2019) achieves several goals. First, it frames the current debates, providing a concise, well-written history of macroeconomics and the key twists and turns in economic policy that have brought us to our current state of (general) disagreement on economic policy. Second, he structures his view of macroeconomics as a rebuttal to a 1946 book by Henry Hazlitt in 1946 called Economics in One Lesson. Seventy years later, Quiggin counters Hazlitt's view that markets are "correct," in that their prices accurately reflect opportunity costs for buyers and sellers. Quiggin's second lesson highlights the externalities and factors that distort those opportunity costs and lead to suboptimal outcomes such as extended unemployment, excessive income inequality, and the seemingly intractable problem (from an economics perspective) of pollution. In the final portion of his book, Quiggin argues what policies he thinks would make markets work better by generating a more accurate understanding of opportunity costs. To some, his prescriptions will look like the program of the Left. The great irony is that his goal is to make markets function better, not rid us of them. Whether you agree with his prescriptions are not, this is a very interesting book and a great way for non-economists to get up to speed on current debates and policy issues without having to do a single test for statistical significance or worry about heteroscedasticity.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Since the last-but-one financial crisis abated and governments responded to better times by clawing back their stimulus packages, a once-obscure economic philosophy has been gaining a growing following on the left. But, following the extraordinary policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even some conservative commentators and policy makers are showing an interest in Modern Monetary Theory or MMT.Not so fast, warns Gerald Epstein in his What's Wrong with Modern Money Theory? A Policy Critique (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). While this progressive economist welcomes any resistance to austerian economics and the policy rethink that the new theory is triggering, he warns against MMT's seductive appeal and its significant practical shortcomings.Gerald Epstein co-directs the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Tim Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors (FT Group) in London.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Before becoming a financial analyst and then a portfolio manager in New York, Daniel Peris worked as a tenure-track professor of Soviet history. I sat down with Dan and talked about his painful but ultimately successful 1990s transition from academia to finance. We chatted about how historical methods and perspectives shaped Dan's unique approach to investing, a style that he has been popularizing in his books and online blogs. Dan talked about the skills he acquired during his training as a historian that helped him succeed in finance. We talked about weighing professional risk in academia and in finance, about doubts that accompanied Dan's journey from one industry to another, his forthcoming book The Ownership Dividend (2024), and what history grads can do to broaden their career prospects. Peris is also the author of The Strategic Dividend Investor (2011) and Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors and How You Can Bring Common Sense to Your Portfolio (2018). His blog "History and Investing" is here. Patryk Babiracki is a historian, researcher and writer; professor & MA student advisor at the University of Texas at Arlington. PhD from Johns Hopkins. Promoter of #AppliedHistory: using historical concepts, frameworks, and methodologies to solve real-world organizational problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Richard Vague really really cares about private-sector debt. And he thinks you should too. In A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Vague sees the rise and fall of private sector debt as the key factor explaining the cycle of economic crises experienced by developed and major developing economies over the past two centuries. The early stages of a lending cycle look and feel good. Everyone is happy, the lenders think they are smart, the borrowers feel they have everything under control. Then the lenders and borrowers take it to another level, and then another, and then it collapses, time and time again. Where are now? The good news is that debt/GDP levels aren't too bad, but in certain sectors of the economy and certain countries, they are flashing red, brightly. Read the book to find which sectors and countries. Vague makes his data available to researchers here. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter@Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Is the University of Chicago-blessed, "greed is good" near-term profits approach to business wearing out its welcome?James O'Toole's The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good(HarperBusiness, 2019) is a welcome addition to the current debate about what is the right balance between the near-term profit motive and long-term social goals in running a business.O'Toole, an emeritus professor of business ethics at USC, argues that entrepreneurs have and can be financially successful and still treat their employees, partners, and customers with respect. He provides two dozen case studies of founders and leaders, ranging from Milton Hershey to Robert Wood Johnson to Herb Kelleher, who tried to do more than just make a quick buck. These pioneers believed that if they practiced a form of ethical capitalism, the profits would roll in. And they did.The challenge that O'Toole recognizes from the outset is that the culture these founders created rarely survived their own tenures at the top, and that the unrelenting pressure of the market ultimately wears down even the most well-intentioned business leader. In the end, he concludes that large publicly traded corporations face the greatest pressures, while smaller, private or trust-held businesses have an easier time of creating and sustaining a positive culture.The Enlightened Capitalists is a must read for every aspiring business leader and investor, even those who are convinced that they are on the "right" side of the debate. The judgments can shift rapidly. Even a spectacularly successful New Economy company that had for years as its motto "Don't be evil" (since replaced with "Do the right thing") can quickly end up being vilified in the media and charged by regulators for its monopoly-like behavior. As Kermit might say, it's not easy being good (or green.)Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance