Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 14:03:17 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: M-I: Wall Street!


Sorry to be so vulgarly self-promotional, but such are the pressures of
commerce.

My book, Wall Street, has been in North American bookstores for a few weeks
now, and should hit UK and Continental European stores pretty soon. The
official U.S. publication date is this Thursday, June 26. The book is a
practical-theoretical scholarly-journalistic dissection of how the
financial markets, particularly in the U.S. but with the "Americanization
of global finance" increasingly the world, work and for whom. The first
half of the book is essentially a primer on the various markets (stocks,
bonds, foreign exchange, derivatives) work; if you've wondered what an
option or an inverse floater is, this is the place to find out. From that
introduction, the book moves onto more theoretical territory: a critical
exposition of such pillars of orthodoxy as efficient market theory and
monetarism, both in themselves and in their broader political context.
After that critical examination, I turn to the contributions of various
renegade theorists, particularly Keynes, Minsky, and Marx. A recurrent
theme of the book is that "finance" contributes surprisingly little to the
financing of actual production, but must be considered in a broader context
as instruments of class consolidation and political control. That point is
made explicit in a chapter on "governance" - the increasing involvement of
(useless, parasitical) shareholders in production, and of (useless,
parasitical) bondholders in setting public policy.

For more info, see http://www.panix/com~dhenwood/Book_info.html.

This week marks the beginning of a round of self-promotional events around
the U.S., to which all readers of this are invited. I don't know the times
of the bookstore appearances yet, but typically they're between 6 and 8 PM.
Here's the list:

fetes
-----
Wed, June 25, 7:30 PM    talk and party, Brecht Forum, 122 W 27th St, NYC
Thu, June 26, 6:30 PM    journey into the belly of the beast, Harry's at
                           Hanover Square (an old-line Wall Street bar)

bookstores
----------
Wed, July 2              Borders, World Trade Center, NYC
Tue, July 8              Vertigo, Washington, DC
Tue, July 29             Printers Ink, Palo Alto
Thu, July 31             Modern Times, San Francisco
Mon, Aug 4               Stacy's, San Francisco
TBA, ~Aug 6              ?, Portland, Ore.
Fri, Aug 8               Elliott Bay, Seattle

More precise details, and any late-breaking events, will be posted to my
website.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217 USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice  +1-212-874-3137 fax
email: <mailto:dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>




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