• Complain

Ron Suskind - Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

Here you can read online Ron Suskind - Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2011, publisher: HarperCollins, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Ron Suskind Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
  • Book:
    Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    HarperCollins
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2011
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The hidden history of Wall Street and the White House comes down to a single, powerful, quintessentially American concept: confidence. Both centers of power, tapping brazen innovations over the past three decades, learned how to manufacture it. Until August 2007, when that confidence finally began to crumble. In this gripping and brilliantly reported book, Ron Suskind tells the story of what happened next, as Wall Street struggled to save itself while a man with little experience and soaring rhetoric emerged from obscurity to usher in a new era of responsibility. It is a story that follows the journey of Barack Obama, who rose as the country fell, and offers the first full portrait of his tumultuous presidency. Wall Street found that straying from long-standing principles of transparency, accountability, and fair dealing opened a path to stunning profits. Obamas determination to reverse that trend was essential to his ascendance, especially when Wall Street collapsed during the fall of an election year and the two candidates could audition for the presidency by responding to a national crisis. But as he stood on the stage in Grant Park, a shudder went through Barack Obama. He would now have to command Washington, tame New York, and rescue the economy in the first real management job of his life. The new president surrounded himself with a team of seasoned playerslike Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithnerwho had served a different president in a different time. As the nations crises deepened, Obamas deputies often ignored the presidents decisionsto protect him from himselfwhile they fought to seize control of a rudderless White House. Bitter disputesbetween men and women, policy and politicsruled the day. The result was an administration that found itself overtaken by events as, year to year, Obama struggled to grow into the worlds toughest job and, in desperation, take control of his own administration. Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind introduces readers to an ensemble cast, from the titans of high finance to a new generation of reformers, from petulant congressmen and acerbic lobbyists to a tight circle of White House advisersand, ultimately, to the president himself, as youve never before seen him. Based on hundreds of interviews and filled with piercing insights and startling disclosures, Confidence Men brings into focus the collusion and conflict between the nations two capitalsNew York and Washington, one of private gain, the other of public purposein defining confidence and, thereby, charting Americas future.

Ron Suskind: author's other books


Who wrote Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

CONFIDENCE MEN

Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

RON SUSKIND

Contents The Two Capitals September 17 2010 The Warning Sonnys Blues - photo 1

Contents

The Two Capitals

September 17, 2010

The Warning

Sonnys Blues

Inside the Bubble

The Fall

The Rise

The B-Team

Home Alone

A New Deal

Well Managed

The Covenant

Unresolved

Nowhere Man

Filling the Void

Mad Men

The Education of Barack Obama

Lost and Found

Mind the Gap

Business as Usual

Gods Work

The Noise

The Man They Elected

THE TWO CAPITALS

September 17, 2010

P resident Barack Obama dances lightly down the four marble steps to the Rose Garden and across the flagstones to a waiting lectern. He still glides, elegant and purposeful, in that tall mans short-stepa ballplayer returning to the court after a time-out.

Today, September 17, 2010, he has committed to putting some points on the board, in the sports parlance of Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff. The president needs to show the country that he hasnt lost his game, the ineffable confidence, the surety of stance and delivery that propelled a man with little political experience to scale cosmic heights and to realize what felt, on Election Day, like democracys version of the moon landing.

Through recent history, America has considered itself something of a providential miracle, a country that kept finding reasons to believe in its Manifest Destiny. That faith, sorely tested over the past several decades, found itself restored with dizzying ebullience when Barack Obama and his beautiful family stepped onto the stage in Chicagos Grant Park as Americas First Family. It was a sensation of such intensity as to startle many across the country and around the world into believing in the promise of America, the original and long-burning beacon of the democratic ideal.

The legacy of that moment is ever more found in the lengthening shadow it casts. In the nearly two years since, Barack Obama, like an archangel returned to earth, has been forced to walk the flat land and feel its hard contours. What, if anything, it has awakened in him remains unclearat present, he is clearly struggling to get his bearings. And yet it is impossible to see the president and not search out signs of that man from Grant Park, who strode so boldly across historys confetti-strewn stage.

On this warm late-summer afternoon, with Congress out of session, Obama has convened the press to announce the launch of a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It has been designed to protect American consumers from the predations of the financial services and banking industry, which over the past couple of decades has grown vast and insatiable by inventing, for the most part, new ways to market, sell, and invest in debt.

The woman standing awkwardly at Obamas left hip, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, has become the nations town crier on the subject of bankruptcy and debt. In the two years since the economic crisis, she has emerged from nowhere to trumpet the story of how debt was turned into a velvety weapon, how engorged financial firms deceptively packaged it, sold it as securities, and extracted usurious profits from American consumers, especially those in Americas once-vaunted middle class. The notion of a consumer financial product agency, a freestanding, independently funded entity like the Federal Communications Commission, was originally hers, unveiled in an article she published in the spring of 2007. The truth is that no one much cared for the idea, until her unheeded concerns turned up at the center of the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

So today is a long-delayed victory for Warrenalmost. Somehow nothing in the Rose Garden is quite as it seems. The president praises Warren, whom he says he met at Harvard Law School, as though they are old friends. Theyre not, and Warren only became a professor at Harvard Law the year after Obama graduated from it. In fact, over the past two years, while Warren has seen herself lionized on magazine covers and in prime-time interviews as a leading voice for tough, restorative reforms, the president seems to have been studiously avoiding her. Part of the problem, clearly, is that she has been acting the way people expected and hoped that man from Grant Park would.

This has caused discomfort not only for the president, but also for his top lieutenants, including the boyish man in the too-long jacket at Obamas right hip, bunched cuffs around his shoes, looking more than anything like a teenager who just grabbed a suit out of his dads closet. Thats Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, looking sheepish. Only those in his inner circle at Treasury, though, can precisely read whats behind that expression: a string of private efforts across the past year to neutralize Warren. The previous fall, Geithner huddled with top aides to develop what one called an Elizabeth Warren strategy, a plan to engage with the firebrand reformer that would render her politically inert. He never worked out a viable strategya way to meet with Warren without drawing undesirable comparisonsand so, like the president, he didnt.

What the Treasury Department did do, unbeknownst to Warren, was embrace demands from the banking industry to create a bureau under the condition that Warren would not be allowed to lead it. But as the financial-reform bill moved to a vote in early summer, industry lobbyists were so aggrieved at the idea of an agencythey felt it unsupportable under any conditionsthat they didnt bother to call in their chits on Warren.

In fact, they played it just so. The industry managed to get the proposed agency shrunk into a bureau that would live under the auspices of the Federal Reserve, the governments greatest mixed metaphor of public purpose and private self-regard, representing as it does the dual interests of a sound monetary policy and the health of the banking industry. Beyond that, the bureaus rules can be vetoed by a two-thirds majority of a panel of other financial regulatorsan indignity of institutionalized second-guessing known to few other agencies.

But after financial regulatory reform legislation passed in July, the prospect of Warren at the bureaus helm quickly grew into a movement: complete with Internet write-in campaigns, online petitions, flurries of editorials, and even a viral rap videocertainly a first in the history of appointing government regulators.

Warren would seem the easiest of choices. Since his earliest days on the campaign trail, Obama had spoken passionately about restoring competent government, and with it competent regulators. With the midterm elections less than two months away, he could have used a confirmation battle over Warren to draw a much-needed distinction between his administration and those, mostly Republicans, who dared to side publicly with Americas big banks and financial firms. Warrens celebrated ferocity looked tailor-made to revive Obamas vast grassroots campaign network. Like an encamped army with nothing to do, the foot soldiers of the campaign had fought among themselves a bit, eaten the leftover rations, and then drifted back to private life. Field commanders still in touch with the White House signaled by midsummer that a Warren confirmation battle would rally the troops and, according to one, at least show what we stand for. On the other side was the financial services industry, which hurled nonspecific attacks at Warren, claiming she was arrogant, disrespectful, and power-hungry. It had begun castigating Obama as antibusiness, a charge the industry asserts would be definitively confirmed by the appointment of Warren.

In mid-August, Warren was finally called in to meet with the president. Obama began their sit-down saying, This isnt a job interview. It wasnt. The president had already decided what he was going to do, in a managerial style that had become his trademark: integrating policy options and political prognostication into a prepackaged solutionannounced before the game even started.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President»

Look at similar books to Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President»

Discussion, reviews of the book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.