--- product_id: 28149876 title: "Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business" price: "€ 47.77" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.hr/products/28149876-makers-and-takers-the-rise-of-finance-and-the-fall store_origin: HR region: Croatia --- # Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business **Price:** € 47.77 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business - **How much does it cost?** € 47.77 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.hr](https://www.desertcart.hr/products/28149876-makers-and-takers-the-rise-of-finance-and-the-fall) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description Is Wall Street bad for Main Street America? "A well-told exploration of why our current economy is leaving too many behind." — The New York Times In looking at the forces that shaped the 2016 presidential election, one thing is clear: much of the population believes that our economic system is rigged to enrich the privileged elites at the expense of hard-working Americans. This is a belief held equally on both sides of political spectrum, and it seems only to be gaining momentum. A key reason, says Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar, is the fact that Wall Street is no longer supporting Main Street businesses that create the jobs for the middle and working class. She draws on in-depth reporting and interviews at the highest rungs of business and government to show how the “financialization of America”—the phenomenon by which finance and its way of thinking have come to dominate every corner of business—is threatening the American Dream. Now updated with new material explaining how our corrupted financial sys­tem propelled Donald Trump to power, Makers and Takers explores the confluence of forces that has led American businesses to favor balance-sheet engineering over the actual kind, greed over growth, and short-term profits over putting people to work. From the cozy relationship between Wall Street and Washington, to a tax code designed to benefit wealthy individuals and corporations, to forty years of bad policy decisions, she shows why so many Americans have lost trust in the sys­tem, and why it matters urgently to us all. Through colorful stories of both “Takers,” those stifling job creation while lining their own pockets, and “Makers,” businesses serving the real economy, Foroohar shows how we can reverse these trends for a better path forward. Review: Incredibly good book, but - I have to give this book five stars because of the depth it goes to on two important subjects - the financialization of American business and its impact on income distribution, and it is good reading. The "but" comes from her beginning and end going back to painting the large commercial banks as the villains when the normal ones had very little to do with the 2008 financial crisis as did the Glass-Steagall Act. Specifically; . Early on she talks about the large increase in financial types among the America's richest people, and in the latest Forbes real-time ranking of billionaires more than 130 of the 1,800 plus billionaires fit this description, but not one was a commercial banker. A 101 year old David Rockefeller might fit that description, but I think his money came from elsewhere. Sandy Weill was at the bottom of the list, but he is more a deal maker and insurance type. Admittedly Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein flirt with the bottom of the list but that would be just 2 spots on the 130 plus if they get back into the rankings. .Then the only big bank she talks about in more than passing is Citigroup, which is not a normal universal national bank. Before merging with Travelers and Salomon Brothers, it got two-thirds of its revenue and income from non-American subsidiaries. Then by merging with Salomon Brothers it became one of the big six in investment banking. This merger was the source of its problems, but if Salomon Bothers had been on its own, the Feds would not have been able to rescue it - and it would have been a second Lehman Brothers. The other big banks - JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America - had little to do with the pre-2008 problems, albeit Bank of America bought its share with its Countrywide purchase. . At the end she does a good job of suggesting solving the financial problem would be helped greatly by tax reform and several other things - and how difficult this is with a polarized congress and overwhelmed regulators; but she also seemed to feel strongly that a reinstated Glass-Steagall and breaking up the banks were important first steps. Does she really want to see Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns on their own again, in this polarized world with regulators dealing with things beyond their control? The heavy hand of a JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo may be the best thing we have going for us relative to avoiding the next crisis. This is a bit of nitpicking, and it is still an important and much needed book. Review: Best for its breadth (3.7-ish stars) - This is the 200-somethingth review, so cut to the chase: this is a good survey of the impact of the financialization on the US economy. Its main strength is that it highlights many facets of the problem. It’s not a fun book to read; it’s crammed with details and doesn’t necessarily make them all hang together clearly. But if you stick with it you’ll get a good — and unsettling — overview. The author (RF) defines financialization as “the trend by which Wall Street and its way of thinking,” which she terms “short-term [and] risky,” have come to “permeate not just the financial industry but all of American business” (@5). She covers numerous aspects of this problem, including: how firms like Apple spend more on buying back their own shares than on R&D, how investment banks like Goldman Sachs hoard physical commodities like aluminum and drive up prices, how private equity firms now control most of the US rental housing market (that one was new to me), how fund managers are helping themselves to Americans’ retirement savings, as well as how financialization has distorted MBA education, the tax code and Washington regulators. I admit I didn’t pay much attention to her proposed solutions: I lack the faith of most American business journalists that big corporate capitalism can provide solutions. But RF’s diagnosis is valuable because it’s so wide-ranging. While some reviewers found the book easy to read, I found it more average in that regard: passionate, quite serious, with some arresting anecdotes, but otherwise fact-filled and at times very jumpy in its timeline. It doesn’t go into depth on many topics of interest: e.g., it’s not the go-to book to understand the derivatives involved in the 2008 financial meltdown (read some chapters of Janet Tavakoli, instead). There are a few celebrity-journalist touches, such as an awkward passage describing how corporate raider Carl Icahn entertained RF with his voice impressions (@121), but these don’t become overwhelming. Immediately before picking up this book I’d read “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?” by the former finance minister of Greece, Yannis Varoufakis. That book covers a different topic (the evolution of the global financial system, and especially the Euro) but shares some features of this book, such as a choppy timeline and name-dropping personal anecdotes. Nonetheless, Varoufakis is a clearer and more thorough expositor of complicated economic ideas, while inserting a good deal of charm and humor. He is a professor who obviously cares about teaching, while RF is a very busy journalist: that contrast may give you some idea of what to expect from this book. A consequence is that the book omits a few simple explanations that might help readers to fit more pieces of the puzzle together. One is that transactions on the stock market generally don’t bring any money to the company whose shares are being traded — the money just trades hands between buyers and sellers. Despite what textbooks tell you about the important social role of the stock market, less than 1% of the annual value of all exchange-based equity trading around the world goes to companies as new capital to expand their businesses; the rest is gambling. So when RF mentions that "activist investors" don't deserve huge dividends from tech companies because they had no role in helping to create the companies' innovative technology or making their products (@124), the same is true of just about any poor zhlub who bought shares on the market: your money didn't help the company accomplish anything. It also might help readers to know that that the value of financial transactions, including on the stock, bond, derivatives and forex markets, is officially excluded from the definition of GDP, which represents the “real” economy of goods and services. The global annual value of trades on stock exchanges alone is bigger than global GDP, and when you consider the value of all trades in all sorts of financial assets, you get many multiples of global GDP. That, in a nutshell, is why rich people see financial markets as a much better place to make money than the real economy in which most of us work, earn money and spend. Some minor issues: RF omits to mention the role of stock analysts in driving both share prices and executive behavior, and to define such terms as “asset values” and “Chinese walls” (and "eating-club": it's a Princeton thing, apparently). Some of her history, especially in Chapter 3, seemed to me a bit off in a few details, too. Surely systems analysis originated not in finance (@75) but in engineering and military operations research: see S. Optner, ed., “Systems Analysis” (Penguin 1973). RF seems to suggest that managers in the 1950s were focused on stock price (@81); but as I recall from listening to grown-ups as a child in the early 1960s, investors cared most about dividends (and “clipping coupons” if they were bondholders), i.e., about a steady stream of income accruing from holding onto assets, not from making money by trading. Also, by equating the emphasis on the bottom line and accounting that prevailed in that era with “financialization” (@79), RF seems to be using the word in a different sense from her definition at the beginning of the book. Finally, I found at least one significant mistake: RF says that the 1919 Michigan Supreme Court case of Dodge v. Ford “enshrined in law” the notion that “companies ha[ve] a legal obligation to maximize profits for investors, and that their interests trumped those of anyone else” (@70-71). When it comes to the day-to-day operations of a company (as distinguished from sale of the company in certain M&A transactions), this is simply not true in any US state or major country of the world, with the possible exception of Michigan. Plenty of businesspeople do believe there is such a legal duty, which often leads to corporations acting like jerks; so it doesn’t help for this book to encourage that false impression. In sum, this isn't a book to read for its style, nor, aside from a few anecdotes, for its details. But for its big picture of how finance has invaded and destabilized so many areas of our lives, it's worth your time. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #1,421,236 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #69 in Economic Policy & Development (Books) #78 in Economic Policy #289 in Economic Conditions (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 733 Reviews | ## Images ![Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/6199uIMdlCL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Incredibly good book, but *by A***N on September 5, 2016* I have to give this book five stars because of the depth it goes to on two important subjects - the financialization of American business and its impact on income distribution, and it is good reading. The "but" comes from her beginning and end going back to painting the large commercial banks as the villains when the normal ones had very little to do with the 2008 financial crisis as did the Glass-Steagall Act. Specifically; . Early on she talks about the large increase in financial types among the America's richest people, and in the latest Forbes real-time ranking of billionaires more than 130 of the 1,800 plus billionaires fit this description, but not one was a commercial banker. A 101 year old David Rockefeller might fit that description, but I think his money came from elsewhere. Sandy Weill was at the bottom of the list, but he is more a deal maker and insurance type. Admittedly Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein flirt with the bottom of the list but that would be just 2 spots on the 130 plus if they get back into the rankings. .Then the only big bank she talks about in more than passing is Citigroup, which is not a normal universal national bank. Before merging with Travelers and Salomon Brothers, it got two-thirds of its revenue and income from non-American subsidiaries. Then by merging with Salomon Brothers it became one of the big six in investment banking. This merger was the source of its problems, but if Salomon Bothers had been on its own, the Feds would not have been able to rescue it - and it would have been a second Lehman Brothers. The other big banks - JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America - had little to do with the pre-2008 problems, albeit Bank of America bought its share with its Countrywide purchase. . At the end she does a good job of suggesting solving the financial problem would be helped greatly by tax reform and several other things - and how difficult this is with a polarized congress and overwhelmed regulators; but she also seemed to feel strongly that a reinstated Glass-Steagall and breaking up the banks were important first steps. Does she really want to see Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns on their own again, in this polarized world with regulators dealing with things beyond their control? The heavy hand of a JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo may be the best thing we have going for us relative to avoiding the next crisis. This is a bit of nitpicking, and it is still an important and much needed book. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Best for its breadth (3.7-ish stars) *by A***R on August 22, 2017* This is the 200-somethingth review, so cut to the chase: this is a good survey of the impact of the financialization on the US economy. Its main strength is that it highlights many facets of the problem. It’s not a fun book to read; it’s crammed with details and doesn’t necessarily make them all hang together clearly. But if you stick with it you’ll get a good — and unsettling — overview. The author (RF) defines financialization as “the trend by which Wall Street and its way of thinking,” which she terms “short-term [and] risky,” have come to “permeate not just the financial industry but all of American business” (@5). She covers numerous aspects of this problem, including: how firms like Apple spend more on buying back their own shares than on R&D, how investment banks like Goldman Sachs hoard physical commodities like aluminum and drive up prices, how private equity firms now control most of the US rental housing market (that one was new to me), how fund managers are helping themselves to Americans’ retirement savings, as well as how financialization has distorted MBA education, the tax code and Washington regulators. I admit I didn’t pay much attention to her proposed solutions: I lack the faith of most American business journalists that big corporate capitalism can provide solutions. But RF’s diagnosis is valuable because it’s so wide-ranging. While some reviewers found the book easy to read, I found it more average in that regard: passionate, quite serious, with some arresting anecdotes, but otherwise fact-filled and at times very jumpy in its timeline. It doesn’t go into depth on many topics of interest: e.g., it’s not the go-to book to understand the derivatives involved in the 2008 financial meltdown (read some chapters of Janet Tavakoli, instead). There are a few celebrity-journalist touches, such as an awkward passage describing how corporate raider Carl Icahn entertained RF with his voice impressions (@121), but these don’t become overwhelming. Immediately before picking up this book I’d read “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?” by the former finance minister of Greece, Yannis Varoufakis. That book covers a different topic (the evolution of the global financial system, and especially the Euro) but shares some features of this book, such as a choppy timeline and name-dropping personal anecdotes. Nonetheless, Varoufakis is a clearer and more thorough expositor of complicated economic ideas, while inserting a good deal of charm and humor. He is a professor who obviously cares about teaching, while RF is a very busy journalist: that contrast may give you some idea of what to expect from this book. A consequence is that the book omits a few simple explanations that might help readers to fit more pieces of the puzzle together. One is that transactions on the stock market generally don’t bring any money to the company whose shares are being traded — the money just trades hands between buyers and sellers. Despite what textbooks tell you about the important social role of the stock market, less than 1% of the annual value of all exchange-based equity trading around the world goes to companies as new capital to expand their businesses; the rest is gambling. So when RF mentions that "activist investors" don't deserve huge dividends from tech companies because they had no role in helping to create the companies' innovative technology or making their products (@124), the same is true of just about any poor zhlub who bought shares on the market: your money didn't help the company accomplish anything. It also might help readers to know that that the value of financial transactions, including on the stock, bond, derivatives and forex markets, is officially excluded from the definition of GDP, which represents the “real” economy of goods and services. The global annual value of trades on stock exchanges alone is bigger than global GDP, and when you consider the value of all trades in all sorts of financial assets, you get many multiples of global GDP. That, in a nutshell, is why rich people see financial markets as a much better place to make money than the real economy in which most of us work, earn money and spend. Some minor issues: RF omits to mention the role of stock analysts in driving both share prices and executive behavior, and to define such terms as “asset values” and “Chinese walls” (and "eating-club": it's a Princeton thing, apparently). Some of her history, especially in Chapter 3, seemed to me a bit off in a few details, too. Surely systems analysis originated not in finance (@75) but in engineering and military operations research: see S. Optner, ed., “Systems Analysis” (Penguin 1973). RF seems to suggest that managers in the 1950s were focused on stock price (@81); but as I recall from listening to grown-ups as a child in the early 1960s, investors cared most about dividends (and “clipping coupons” if they were bondholders), i.e., about a steady stream of income accruing from holding onto assets, not from making money by trading. Also, by equating the emphasis on the bottom line and accounting that prevailed in that era with “financialization” (@79), RF seems to be using the word in a different sense from her definition at the beginning of the book. Finally, I found at least one significant mistake: RF says that the 1919 Michigan Supreme Court case of Dodge v. Ford “enshrined in law” the notion that “companies ha[ve] a legal obligation to maximize profits for investors, and that their interests trumped those of anyone else” (@70-71). When it comes to the day-to-day operations of a company (as distinguished from sale of the company in certain M&A transactions), this is simply not true in any US state or major country of the world, with the possible exception of Michigan. Plenty of businesspeople do believe there is such a legal duty, which often leads to corporations acting like jerks; so it doesn’t help for this book to encourage that false impression. In sum, this isn't a book to read for its style, nor, aside from a few anecdotes, for its details. But for its big picture of how finance has invaded and destabilized so many areas of our lives, it's worth your time. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ - - - Best of the Best - - - *by S***S on December 18, 2016* If this doesn't win a Pulitzer Prize, I'm scared to imagine what else would. Excluding religious work, this is the best book I have ever read. (The book I read just prior to it was written by a Nobel Prize winner on a similar topic, and doesn’t even compare.) There’s a difference between news (anything new) and information (content that informs). We live in a world flooded with news, but relatively void of clear information. This book is a milestone work that will hopefully help to spark a new genre. Business optimization involves both cost control and value creation. Without sweeping change, the current obsession with the former and comparative abandonment of the latter will “optimize” us right out of being a functional civilization. Finance ultimately reduces to accounting, and if it does not perform as a service to those who are pioneering functional solutions within their individual areas of expertise, then it operates as a tax that progressively corners the world’s wealth for the elite at the cost of the human potential and social wellbeing otherwise promised by the Enlightenment. “Makers and Takers” is an obvious labor of love that is driven by objective logic, informed and materialized by a tour de force of research, and presented with top notch clarity. It is not a political work, but a policy exploration. Politics is opacity. Policies are solutions, grown from seeds of shared understanding. I implore you to read this to help inform your financial future, and empower your influence on government policies. If you’re a teacher, I implore you to make this required reading for your students. If you’re Rana Foroohar- Congratulations on this masterpiece!!! I hope that you are involved in the most crucial policy decisions in Washington. If you’re interested, I’d like see you as President of the United States at some stage in your career. ## Frequently Bought Together - Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business - Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World - Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.hr/products/28149876-makers-and-takers-the-rise-of-finance-and-the-fall](https://www.desertcart.hr/products/28149876-makers-and-takers-the-rise-of-finance-and-the-fall) --- *Product available on Desertcart Croatia* *Store origin: HR* *Last updated: 2026-07-17*