The Looting of America: How the Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It »

After attending Oberlin College and Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (MPA 1975), Les cofounded and currently directs two non-profit educational organizations: The Labor Institute (1976) and the Public Health Institute (1986). He designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment and economics. He is now helping to form an alliance between the United Steel Workers Union and the Sierra Club. This profound work of non-fiction should be required reading for anyone who has ever had a job and everyone who believes that only fools limit their dreams for a better world.

"I loved this book. A worms'-eye dissection of the Wall Street crisis from a very sharp and very knowledgeable labor economist. Here's hoping that before the Washington consensus gets set in stone, policymakers will read it and reflect on the havoc the masters of the universe have wreaked on ordinary people."
--Charles Morris, author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash and Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen

How could the best and brightest (and most highly paid) in finance crash the global economy and then get us to bail them out as well? What caused this mess in the first place? Housing? Greed? Dumb politicians? What can Main Street do about it?

In The Looting of America, Leopold debunks the prevailing media myths that blame low-income home buyers who got in over their heads, people who ran up too much credit-card debt, and government interference with free markets. Instead, readers will discover how Wall Street undermined itself and the rest of the economy by playing and losing at a highly lucrative and dangerous game of fantasy finance.

He also asks some tough questions:

• Why did Americans let the gap between workers' wages and executive compensation grow so large?
• Why did we fail to realize that the excess money in those executives' pockets was fueling casino-style investment schemes?
• Why did we buy the notion that too-good-to-be-true financial products that no one could even understand would somehow form the backbone of America's new, postindustrial economy?
• How do we make sure we never give ourwages away to gamblers again?
• And what can we do to get our money back?

In this page-turning narrative (no background in finance required) Leopold tells the story of how we fell victim to Wall Street's exotic financial products. Readers learn how even school districts were taken in by "innovative" products like collateralized debt obligations, better known as CDOs, and how they sucked trillions of dollars from the global economy when they failed. They'll also learn what average Americans can do to ensure that fantasy finance never rules our economy again.

As the country teeters on the brink of what could be the next Great Depression, we should be especially wary of the so-called financial experts who got us here, and then conveniently got themselves out. So far, it appears they've won the battle, but The Looting of America refuses to let them write the history—or plan its aftermath.

Publishers Weekly

Deeming himself the "Main Streeter" to explain the economic crisis to average Americans, author and researcher Leopold (The Men Who Hated Work and Loved Labor) does a cagey job explaining credit derivative obligations (CDOs), and their role in the financial meltdown, in populist terms. Unfortunately, his folksy presentation is grating at best and condescending at worst; in one egregious example, his analogy between "fantasy finance" and "fantasy football" is not just patronizing, but obscures his meaning. Still, his astute arguments make it clear that the blame earned by Wall Street and (to some degree) the government has been displaced onto ordinary Americans. Yet, he proves just as partisan as his opponents in painting free market crusaders as remorseless villains. Hamhanded solutions (described in terms of how much Wall Street will dislike them) read like a wish list for the Democratic party: financial disaster insurance, wage caps for CEOs, more unionizing, increasing real wages and nationalizing student loans among them. Whether any of these solutions are politically or economically feasible gets cursory attention. A standard muckraking explication of America's financial hole, this report should resonate with those already on Leopold's side.
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