● The Postcatastrophe Economy: Rebuilding America and Avoiding the Next Bubble
by Eric Janszen
Excerpt via Street.com
“The bright side of the crisis we’re currently facing is that it could serve as a political forcing function for the United States to develop its competitive muscle and eliminate its dependence on foreign borrowing and oil — the main source of our current problems. To execute a true restructuring plan requires strong and uncompromising leaders who are willing to level with the American people, to explain the seriousness of our problems, the sacrifices we all must make to solve them, the new and better nation for ourselves and our children that we will enjoy if we do, and the disaster that awaits us if we fail to meet this challenge.
That sounds good, but how? I argue that we can nurture the seeds of a new American industrial economy — a productive economy that generates profits from technological industries such as computers, biology, medicine, and high-technology materials — by cultivating next-generation transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure. ”

● Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
by Nicholas Phillipson
Review via New Statesman
“The myth of Adam Smith is that he was the hard-nosed high priest of self-interested capitalism. A new biography shows that his intellectual goals were far greater and nobler.”
● Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini
Video of speech by author via C-Span2/Book TV
● The Great Reflation: How Investors Can Profit From the New World of Money
by J. Anthony Boeckh
Review via Canadian Business Online Blog
“J. Anthony Boeckh’s book, The Great Reflation (2010), is well worth a read if you have a curiosity about economic/financial trends from an investor’s point of view, and want one of the clearest and most insightful analyses of past, present and future developments. Boeckh knows his stuff: he was chairman and editor-in-chief from 1968 to 2002 of BCA Publications, an advisor to institutional clients on economic and financial trends…
The near collapse of the financial system in 2008 occurred because central bankers were focused on fighting the last war. After the near hyperinflation of the 1970s, they thought their job was simply to keep the Consumer Price Index (CPI) low. So money and credit creation was allowed to run loose and respond to every bump in the road during the 1990s and 2000s because the low CPI signaled everything was OK. But the extra money and credit was puffing up asset bubbles that were later to go bust.”
● Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street
by Michael Hirsh
Excerpt via John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
“Most of what we now consider economic wisdom is the result of an endless series of arguments and counterarguments, lasting several hundred years, around this question of human rationality in the marketplace.”
● Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us
by John Quiggin
Excerpt via Princeton University Press
“It is clear that there is something badly wrong with the state of economics. A massive financial crisis developed under the eyes of the economics profession, and yet most failed to see anything wrong. Even after the crisis, there has been no proper reassessment. Too many economists are continuing as before, as if nothing had happened. Already, some are
starting to claim that nothing did happen, that the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath constitute a mere “blip” that should not require any rethinking of fundamental ideas.
The ideas that caused the crisis and were, at least briefly, laid to rest by it are already reviving and clawing their way through up the soft earth. If we do not kill these zombie ideas once and for all, they will do even more damage next time.”