Average Customer Review: ( 13 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 28 found the following review helpful:
 The hidden truth of third world debt Feb 25, 2004
By R. J. C. Roeber
We have heard much about the crisis of third world debt and what to do about it from liberal ("forgive the debt") and right-wing ("bankrupt the suckers") commentators. James Henry asks a more fundamental question, where did the money go? Why is there so little to show for the more than $2.7 trillion of debt, aid, and investment made available to the developing world since the 1970s? One answer is that it was not spent but stolen and wasted, maybe as little as one-third of it ending up on the ground. Much of the rest has gone to provide the political elites of recipient countries with retirement homes in pleasant places.Henry, a lawyer and economist by training and an investigative journalist by avocation, has been working on this story since the late 1980s. He travelled to more than 50 countries in pursuit of it and his book contains original, first-hand accounts of decades of unscrupulous financial behavior in the Philippines, Brazil, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Mexico. What started off as an economist's enquiry into the paradox of third world debt has ended up as an indictment of the first world corporations that helped to create it. Henry tells how many of the world's leading banks and financial groups have, often with the complicity of their governments and supranational institutions, created and fuelled the new high-growth global markets for dirty debt, capital flight, money laundering, tax evasion, corruption, illicit weapons traffic, and other new transnational forms of dubious economic activity. This is an essential book. Corruption is the scandal of third world debt. Attempts to relieve it must include the means to prevent its happening again.
18 of 18 found the following review helpful:
Really interesting new material about Latin America, ME Jan 02, 2004
By RClark
I'm a Latin American scholar. Henry's well-written book manages to get below the surface, and deliver some amazing new revelations about Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, in particular. I was also interested to find out exactly where Paraguay's General Stroessner, the Phillipines' Marcos, Pakistan's Bhutto, Zaire's Mobutu, and quite a few other Third World thugs kept their foreign loot -- and not only in Switzerland! Not easy reading, but it will definitely change your perspective on the global economy....
9 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Development Economics To The Next Level May 20, 2005
By Matt Clifford
"The Blood Bankers" is an important contribution to our understanding of global financial instability. Most often, liberalized (legitimate) capital markets, international trade, state power, and international regulatory institutions are cited as the causes of destabilization. However, J. Henry allows us to look behind these forces and bodies to see how the liberalization of the global economy has unleashed illicit and/ or immoral financial forces, often acting through otherwise legitimate enterprises. Thus, "The Blood Bankers" gives us another level of understanding and critique of the agents of globalization. Without understanding the underground players, it would be impossible to fully understand the instability of modern international markets.
15 of 17 found the following review helpful:
The Blood Bankers Made Me See Red Dec 18, 2003
By christine andrews
The Blood Bankers:Tales from the Global Underground Economy is a non-fiction financial thriller/whodunit that illuminates the sordid, self-serving, elitist international money trail and the greedy creatures who travel shamelessly on it. Mr. Henry courageously lifts the veil of monetary indecency and carefully guarded fiscal secrecy as he takes the reader on an insider's guided tour of global corruption and greed. Truth is indeed, stranger than fiction and The Blood Bankers is a shocking account of unbridled greed, run wild in plain sight around the world. It features a virtual perp walk of duplicitous international bankers, beyond-corrupt politicans and heads of state, and a whole supporting cast of money launderers, corporate con men and underworld predators. If you're ready to lose your intellectual virginity, read this book. The world will never look the same.
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Economic Journalist Explores The Third World May 17, 2005
By Noah Enelow
Major U.S. banks have knowingly dealt with the corrupt elites of the world's developing countries.
They have harbored capital flight from wealthy investors who had lost confidence in their country.
They have extended loans to corrupt industrialists, who promptly skimmed the profits and, through their political connections, convinced the national governments to guarantee the loans, placing the burden on the backs of the poor.
They have lent money to violently repressive military dictators.
They have accepted bribes; they have offered bribes; they have turned a blind eye to untold human suffering.
See all 13 customer reviews on Amazon.com
|
based on 13 reviews
