Book review: ‘Age of Greed’ by Jeff Madrick

Once they’ve been carved out and stamped, reiterated in books and taught to schoolchildren, the units of historical time can seem as natural and apparent as the continents and oceans on a map of the Earth: the Progressive Era, the Gilded Age, Reconstruction. We know that each of these names is a human invention, each year dividing these periods a matter of human choice. But we don’t notice the invention when it’s happening; we never see anyone decide when an era begins, or what to call it, or what qualities mark it as an epoch.

What has defined our time — America since the 1960s? Historians are now trying to figure it out. In “Restless Giant,” James T. Patterson placed prosperity and freedom at the center of our fin de siecle journey. For Sean Wilentz, it was “The Age of Reagan,” a time of ascendant conservatism. Daniel Rodgers calls it an “Age of Fracture,” when old and widely shared verities splintered into a jumble of irreconcilable premises.

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(Knopf) - ‘Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present’ by Jeff Madrick. Knopf. 464 pp. $30

Jeff Madrick, in his compelling new history, dubs it an Age of Greed. Madrick is not a professional historian but an accomplished economic journalist known for his essays in the New York Review of Books. Nor is he surveying all of American politics since the 1960s, just the major changes in business, finance and policymaking. Yet his book tries, like the others, to define and explain the long era, creating a larger framework by which future generations will understand our time. Ambitious in its scope and frequently persuasive in its arguments, “Age of Greed” abounds with powerful men, ugly fights, infamous scandals, twists and turns, and, true to the book’s title, lots of shameless cupidity.

“Age of Greed” chronicles how Americans ended up with the highly unregulated financial system that produced the meltdown of 2008 and the fallout that lingers three years later. What’s most novel about the book, which relies heavily on other secondary accounts, is that unlike other recent treatments of the financial crisis, it traces the origins of the problem not to the Bush or Clinton or even Reagan years, but all the way to the late 1960s.

Back then, in the heyday of the post-World War II economy, a handful of bankers, businessmen, economists and politicians began campaigning to discredit, repeal and, when necessary, evade the controls that had governed lending and borrowing since the New Deal. Steadily, they made inroads, taking advantage of hard times, such as the stagflation-plagued ’70s, as well as good times, such as the tech-fueled ’90s. By 2008, as Madrick tells it, a once-worthy regime of safeguards had ceased to meaningfully police Wall Street or many other realms of American business.

A 40-year march through the world of Eurodollar CDs, greenmail and credit default swaps might strain a general reader’s comprehension, let alone interest. To relieve the tedium, Madrick breaks his story into 20 chapters, each a biographical thumbnail of one or more key players. Laying out these sketches in a strategic order, like a bridge player setting down his cards, Madrick constructs a more or less coherent tale out of his many political, financial and business-world fragments.