I bought the book when it came out in 2008, so it was obviously written before the big financial collapse, and before Obama was elected. It happened to be on the shelf next to the book I was going to use -- which I can use some other day! -- and so I grabbed this instead. The quote is actually the third paragraph of the Preface! Phillips wrote an "Update" published in 2009, which I didn't know about until today, and I am seriously considering making it an early holiday gift to myself.
From the Kindle sample of the update:
Letting the merger and acquisitions process run wild and create mega-firms beyond effective national regulation but disposed to experiment and speculate hither and yon was disastrous. Allowing the financial sector to metastasize using $15 trillion of borrowed money over a quarter of a century was calamitous. So was permitting the derivatives and securitization business to create its $11 trillion of this and $53 trillion of that with the most incestuous and uncontrolled webs of distribution and counter-party relationships. And turning the core of the American dream, home ownership, into a trap for the rest of that dream staggers belief.
Kevin Phillips. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism . Penguin Publishing Group.
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