The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy - Softcover

"The best financial history of the period yet." - New York Times "... as the economy continues to plummet from its historic heights in the '90s ... here's a book which explains in accessible ways why it it has gone so fast and why it seems to be coming down so quickly." - Steve Wassermann on CNN's News Night With Aaron Brown "Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz may be celebrity economists, but it is an economic historian whose earlier work focused on the origins of capitalism in the late feudal Europe who has turned out the most compelling and comprehensive account of the crisis gripping contemporary global capitalism. UCLA Professor Robert Brenner's recent work is a solidly argued and empirically impeccable restatement of the centrality of overproduction in capitalism." -- Walden Bello, The Nation "Its implications are portentous." - Jack Beatty, Atlantic Monthly "Brenner offers a more scholarly analysis of the recent decade than most commentators who tend to overpraise or dismiss recent technological innovations... something of a thriller with a to-be-continued ending" - James Flanigan, Los Angeles Times Cover Review "An uncanny ability to map the future... his conviction that the financial bubble that sustained the US economy around the end of the century would be exposed as corrupt as well as misguided has now been proved right." - Charles Leadbetter, New Statesman "In this interesting and original work, Brenner examines the recent collapse of the US economy... not merely another post-mortem on the bursting of the bubble economy of the last decade. Rather, Brenner provides a historical and international context to his discussion by framing it within the global economic stagnation of the early 1990s" - Choice

In this crisp and far-sighted book, Robert Brenner demonstrates the New Economy was always a fragile phenomenon which never overcame the fundamental problems that continue to afflict the US and global economies. His substantial new Postscript provides an up-to-date analysis of the Bush economic debacle - the crisis of manufacturing, the telecom bust, the record twin deficits, plummeting employment, and the real estate bubble.