Make no mistake. America is in serious trouble. If you will, wander down to K-15 any day and watch as one train every 10 or 15 minutes chugs by loaded down with containers full of Chinese junk paid for by American debt, mostly treasury bills. Check out the Yellow Pages and count the mushrooming numbers of "car title" and "payday" loan outfits in this city.

Money is "bad," in the historical sense, when a leading world economic power passing its zenith—before the United States, think Hapsburg Spain, the maritime Dutch Republic (when New York was New Amsterdam), and imperial Britain just before World War I—lets itself luxuriate in finance at the expense of harvesting, manufacturing, or transporting things. Doing so has marked each nation's global decline. To institutionalize the dominance of minimally regulated finance at this stage of U.S. history is a bad idea.

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For those who don't harbor burning ambitions or insatiable acquisitive streaks, money is the root of all evil. Money, these people will tell you, can't buy happiness. While most Americans would probably agree with this sentiment — if only as a holdover from religious training that encouraged charity and thrift as signs of virtue — we still pursue money with a focus that borders on obsession. And those who actually do score big financially often complain that they don't have time to "enjoy" the money they manage to amass.

Bad Money is a short book by a practiced artist who specializes in identifying the defining trends of American life. Here Kevin Phillips takes on financial practice in the age of Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, and the global rule of Goldman, Sachs. It’s not meant to be pretty, and it isn’t.

Comes now Kevin Phillips, mighty sage of "political economy," that gray area spanning elections, growth, and geography, to condemn the financial-service industries he blames for the current credit crunch.
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With a recession at the gates, Phillips's previous record as a Republican strategist-turned-skeptic gives "Bad Money" the gravity sure to guide the conversation about what is to be done.

At a time when the Cassandras of finance are looking like realists, there is no gloomier prophet than Kevin Phillips. The author of 13 previous books including at least one classic, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” Mr. Phillips sees a perfect economic storm coming. The final pages of his bleak new book, “Bad Money,” tell of an “unprecedented” number of Americans planning to leave the country or thinking about it. Readers of “Bad Money” may come away with a similar impulse to flee.

To hear Kevin Phillips tell it, the U.S. is a world power on the skids, an overstretched empire slumping toward the fate of Hapsburg Spain, the maritime Dutch Republic and imperial Britain.

The culprits: Wall Street and Washington.

The former Republican strategist lays out his harsh case in ``Bad Money,'' an update of his 2006 bestseller, ``American Theocracy,'' which warned that the U.S. was dangerously dependent on debt and oil. Events have so far vindicated his views.

Kevin Phillips once gain does us all a service with his sharp and wonderfully lucid discussion of finance and politics. Since we can take it for granted now that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are going to attempt any reforms of the US financial system this year, the task is going to fall to the next President to propose something. I wish I could find real grounds for optimism, but that's not easy.

Kevin Phillips' new book, "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism," would be sobering enough if it were the first we'd ever heard from him. When you take into account how often he's been right in the past, this 14th volume in his continuing commentary on the American condition becomes positively alarming.

Another election year, another jeremiad from Kevin Phillips. As the veteran political commentator notes in the preface to "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism," the new book is his fourth in six years, which is impressive production by any standard. Phillips claims he did not originally intend to mark the 2008 election campaign with yet another tome lambasting the state of America. But really, what are you supposed to do when all your dire predictions of catastrophe and imperial decline start manifesting themselves in real time?