Introduction
The Parasite, the Host, and Control of the Economy’s Brain
The Twelve Themes of this Book
1. The Financial Sector’s Rise to Power
2. The Long Fight to Free Economies from Feudalism’s Rentier Legacy
3. The Critique and Defense of Economic Rent, From Locke to Mill
4. The All-Devouring “Magic of Compound Interest”
5. How the One Percent Holds the 99 Percent in Exponentially Deepening Debt
6. Rentiers Sponsor Rent-Free National Income Statistics
7. The Failed Attempt to Industrialize High Finance
8: The Stock Market as a Predatory Arena
9. From the Stock Market’s Origins to Junk Bonding
10. Finance vs. Industry: Two Opposite Sides of the Balance Sheet
11. The Bubble Economy: From Asset-Price Inflation to Debt Deflation
12. The Bankers Saw It Coming, but Economists Averted their Eyes
13. The Bailout Coup of 2008: Saving Wall Street instead of the Economy
14. The Giveaways Get More Deeply Politicized and Corrupt
15. Wall Street’s Pretends to Insure against the Crash
16. Bailing out of Goldman via AIG
17. Wall Street Takes Control and Blocks Debt Writedowns
18. From Democracy to Oligarchy
19. Europe’s Self-Imposed Austerity
20. The Financial Conquest of Latvia: From the Soviet Orbit to Neoliberal Austerity
21. Creation of the Troika: Its Pro-Bank, Anti-Labor Agenda
22. High Finance Turns Democracy to “Junk”
23. High Finance installs Technocrats as Proconsuls
24. The Troika’s Road to Debt Serfdom
25. U.S. Courts Block Debt Writedowns
26. Financial Austerity or a Clean Slate?
27. Finance as Warfare
28. Is the Mode of Parasitism overshadowing the Mode of Production?
29. The Fight for the 21st Century