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The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.
Crisis Cities blends critical theoretical insight with a historically-grounded comparative study to examine the redevelopment efforts following the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of research in the two cities, Gotham and Greenberg contend that New York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic crisis cities, representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly dominant for crisis-stricken cities around the world. This mode of urbanization emphasizes the privatization of disaster aid, devolution of recovery responsibility to the local state, use of tax incentives and federal grants to spur market-centered redevelopment, and utopian branding campaigns to market the redeveloped city for business and tourism. Meanwhile, it eliminates "low-income" and "public benefit" standards that once underlay emergency provisions. Focusing on the pre- and post-history of disaster, Gotham and Greenberg show how this approach exacerbates the uneven landscapes of risk and resiliency that helped produce crisis in the first place, while potentially reproducing the conditions for future crisis. At the same time, they highlight the expanding coalitions that formed following 9/11 and Katrina to contest these inequities and envision a more just and sustainable urban future.
Cities can no longer meet service demands. Highways and water supply systems are increasingly inadequate; the quality of local health care and education has never been lower. These are problems which are germane to cities new or old, growing or declining, Sunbelt or Frostbelt.Thirty top urban affairs and municipal finance experts focus on the issues and approaches to the major financial problems facing cities in the 1980s. In these invited essays demographic changes, regional economic shifts, inflation, voter resistance and changing intergovernmental roles are viewed each for their impact on the capacity of cities to finance public services.The book is essential reading for city managers, business administrators, public officials, planners, planning board members and those interested in the future viability of American cities.
On July 18, 2013, the city of Detroit filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. Despite Detroit’s apparently extreme demographic, economic, and fiscal challenges, the city has been deployed as both a model of crisis response and as a warning of imminent fiscal distress for all U.S. cities. I argue that Detroit is an important site where the narrative of widespread urban fiscal crisis is constituted. This dissertation examines the dominant narratives of urban fiscal crisis and the implementation of austerity budgets and restructured governance in U.S. cities in the wake of the Great Recession. Using data from the Census Annual Survey of Local Government Finances, city budget documents, ratings agency comments, news articles, and public speeches by local officials, I describe both the national emergence of urban fiscal crisis from 2007-2013 and four local case histories: Detroit, Dallas, Philadelphia, and San Jose. I find that the same themes characterizing Detroit’s crisis are reflected in many other American cities: ratings downgrades, high-risk debt instruments, reduced autonomy vis a vis state governments, restructuring obligations to public employees, expanded privatization of government goods and services, exhortations to adapt to a “new” economy, and the handing over of financial management to unelected experts. These policies are justified by a common narrative of urban fiscal crisis that has become “common sense:” a taken-for-granted explanation of widespread urban fiscal crisis that blames government overreach, municipal fiscal irresponsibility, excessive public employee compensation, and a “new normal” of scarcity and economic volatility. Through the reproduction of this common sense by local officials, austerity and external fiscal discipline are framed as the only alternatives to financial emergency. I argue that the current wave of urban fiscal crisis contrasts with earlier periods of crisis in several important ways: (a) the scale and breadth of deep crisis after years of disinvestment and evisceration of the public sector; (b) the promotion of fiscal discipline as general governance, pushed by financial institutions, budget “experts,” and state legislatures; (c) the framing of cities as isolated fiscal entities that must practice “individual responsibility” and be held subject to the same consequences as private actors in financial markets. Finally, unlike the crises of the 1970s and 1980s, which were closely associated with the abandonment of people and capital from the central city, and an accompanying discourse of inner city crime and poverty, the current narratives of fiscal crisis must be understood in the context of a new political dynamic of city revitalization, inner city wealth, and suburban decline—along with growing spatial inequality. My work is situated within three empirical and theoretical engagements that cut across urban planning, economic geography, and political science: (1) the politics of public budgeting, in particular the politics of collective consumption, tax equity, and retrenchment; (2) the embedding of neoliberal logics of market governance in urban politics, particularly through the circulation of narratives and policy models; and (3) the financialization of urban policy, and the role of political and economic context in shaping the relationship between cities and circuits of financial capital. My project demonstrates the fertility of city budgeting as a terrain for studying broad shifts in political expectations and the relationship between public finance and urban democracy.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York—and reshaped ideas about government across America. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.
The great U.S. mortgage crisis was a transformative event that will reverberate for decades across families, neighborhoods, and cities. After years of research on various aspects of the crisis, Dan Immergluck examines what went wrong, identifying the factors that created the fragile housing finance system, which provided fertile ground for calamity. He also examines the federal response to the crisis, including who benefitted most from the response, and how a more effective and fair response could have been formulated. To reduce the incidence of future crises, Immergluck provides a pathway for building a more stable and fair housing finance system that would be less vulnerable to the booms and busts of global finance. Housing finance helps determine access to stable, decent-quality, affordable housing and also affects the geography of housing and educational opportunities. Thus, housing markets shape our communities, our neighborhoods, and our social and economic opportunities. Immergluck’s analysis and formulation of a way forward will be of particular interest to those concerned with urban form, neighborhood change and stability, and urban planning and policy, as well as those interested in housing and mortgage markets more generally.
In the past two decades powerful economic, social, and fiscal forces have buffeted America's major cities. The urbanization of poverty, the shift in employment from manufacturing to services, middle-class flight to the suburbs and Sunbelt, the tax revolt, and cuts in federal aid have made it difficult for many cities to pay for such basic services as police and fire protection, sanitation, and roads. In "America's Ailing Cities" Helen F. Ladd and John Yinger identify and measure the impact of these broad national trends. Drawing on data from 86 major cities, they offer a rigorous and innovative analysis of urban fiscal conditions. Specifically, they determine the impact of a wide range of factors that lie outside municipal control, including a city's basic economic structure and state-determined fiscal institutions, on a city's underlying fiscal health-- the difference between potential revenue and the expenditure needed to finance public services of acceptable quality. Concluding that the fiscal health of America's cities has worsened since 1972, the authors call for new state and federal urban policies that direct assistance to the neediest cities.