Kickstarters I’d like to see

Thank you Henry. You are my hero.

I’m pissed at myself for not thinking about this before, but delighted at the prospect. I don’t know if DH is interested, or anyone has tried this, but Kickstarter as a kind of democratic strategy for advances for an author — could it work? I’ve seen it used with filmmakers, as well as with musicians to raise money to record a CD, with sponsors promised the CD, tickets to the CD release party, and so forth — i.e. all the cool things people like to have for being on the inside. And supporting a cool project.

A good cause. Any idea why PayPal turns up is nose at my credit cards? (No, it’s not a problem that I encounter frequently.)

Yep – I’m in for $100.

Have you read the Yanis Varoufakis’s book, ‘Modern Political Economics’? Less finance, more Eco, but it’s excellent.

I’d contribute.

I’m in for $100. “Wall Street” should be made required reading in every PhD finance program in the country. Doug has done THE best job of summarizing and critiquing the seminal academic literature on finance and financial theory. Here’s a weird conincidenc: both Mike Jensen and Doug are from NJ! Must be something in that Westwood water supply that makes you wanna rebel. BTW: ditto those comments about left-leaning publishers: the only thing they learned from Marx was how to generate an infinite value for s/v. My experience has been that they’re financially incompetent, have high editorial turnover, and delay projects even if you make every single goddamn deadline.

I’d be in as well.

Read it six months ago for free, I’ll happily kick in $100 but it was so prescient when it was written I don’t think it’ll need too much updating.

I’d be all for that.

I’d contribute.

I am in.

I’m in.

Doug Henwood is always entertaining on Twitter. He looks like Dick Cheney but has the temperament and word choice of a young Spencer Ackerman.

I’m in, but am not on PayPal (and given the PayPal spam I get, I can’t afford to be).

Is there any other way of paying?

Obviously I love this idea. I still for some reason have such a vivid memory of bringing the paperback home after buying it at KramerBooks in DC.

After we read the book, spousal unit will probably want to contribute. In the division of intellectual labor, he received economics, physics and CS.

I’m in for $20 and wish I could do more poor gone-back-to-school-for-a-practical-degree-this-time grad student that I am. And I’ve often in the last few years wished for an updated version so I’m delighted to see this.

Also don’t miss his fantastic radio show, I think it’s the best public affairs show out there: http://leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html
(and which I hope will soon be returning to its original home at Pacifica’s WBAI).

I’m in for $20. My first copy is much borrowed (and always returned, eventually).

I’d be more than happy for it to be a DRM free ebook (epub preferably).

Doug, do you still plan to do the book on the ruling class?

I’d happily contribute $100, but the sad fact is there’s only one Doug Henwood and I’m also really looking forward to the book he’s working on about the American ruling class. So I worry a bit about setting that back, but happy to leave it to Doug to decide.

Another penurious grad student in for $20 — and I am reminded to resubscribe to the newsletter: http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/LBO_subinfo.html

I might be an unemployed student, but count me in.

What little discretionary funds I/we have are committed, but I too would love to see a second edition (I have the first), and would probably purchase the second (with permission from the one who earns the bulk of our household income).

I’m totally in for $100. I’ve been hoping exactly the same thing for years.

I’m in for $30. And Doug really looks nothing like Dick Cheney.

A couple of other questions about Henwood’s study.
Does not the NASDAQ blowup show that insiders had not lost all power to rentiers?
I am also not quite sure whether Henwood’s framework would allow for both the radical, anti-cyclical action that the Fed has taken and for its ineffectiveness. It would seem that monetary policy is not as crucial as Henwood had seemed to suggest. So I am wondering whether he would rethink his understanding of the determinants and consequences of monetary policy.

I’d advise everyone to heed what Aaron Swartz (#40) says above. That said, I’m in.

er, Robert Brenner.

I’d happily pay a $100 kickstart.

I’m in too.

I am in (from Denmark), as wee also get the heat from the crooks at Wall Street

You can count me in too.

Know nothing about publishing but would be interested to find out what level of demand would be sufficient for Verso to consider a re-issue? If they knew several hundred would commit to buying a second edition would that suffice, or would it require thousands, tens of thousands?

I support this call and it remains an important work as is the whole LBO project.

(if you choose to re-write this as a substantive comment rather than a snide ad hominem, we will consider posting it – the eds).

I’m in for $20-30, even though I have no idea what Kickstarter is or how it works. I trust someone will explain if and when this reaches critical mass and DH agrees to go ahead.

Moderator: Please add to my previous comment the following:
Doug has also been an early warner on other issues, like Social Security. This LBO, http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/AntisocInsec.html from 1998, was the first, as far as I know, to critique the SS Trustees for their assumptions, which led to their predictions of a funding crisis. Thus the push to reduce “entitlements”.

would be interested to find out what level of demand would be sufficient for Verso to consider a re-issue?

My understanding is that the copyright has now reverted from Verso to Doug (hence the free download), and that the state of publisher/author relations is such that requests from Verso to bring out a second edition now that they realise there’s money in it might be met with a salty response.

My guess is that the comparison of Brenner’s work with Henwood’s would go some way to explaining why Verso let the copyright revert to Henwood. Do crises originate in the real sector as a result of the globalization of production or in the financial sector as a result of a Minsky cycle? Was the Japanese bank led system in fact superior to Anglo American financial model? If the difficulties originate in the financial sector, then how do we account for nonfinancial corporate businesses having more than $1.5 trillion in
financial assets available to them, money they could invest tomorrow if they saw any need to do so, as Bruce Bartlett recently asked in the New York Times.

Chiming in that I, too, would love to see this happen and cheerfully pledge $100.

unglue.it is trying to be a platform for these kinds of projects. They worked with Open Book Publishers to reissue Ruth H. Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa. Might be worth checking out.

Count me in!

What a good idea. I would contribute (and buy several copies of the new edition).

40€ from Finland. Where do I sign up?

What is it that Wall Street does? Mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, proprietary trading and of course securitization of income flows especially insofar as it amounted to the selling of snake oil. We certainly need Henwood’s lucidity and empirical mastery to explain this to us.

I would be very interested in what Henwood would have to say about securitization.
There is some Hilferding bashing in Henwood’s book as there is in Sherri Berman’s book. And that may well be justified given the positions of the older Hilferding.

But let’s take the young Hilferding in Finance Capital and see what he said about what he called promoters’ profit.

Here’s his example, and I am trying to figure out to the extent that it throws light on the recent activity of Wall Street.

Start with an industrial firm with a capital of 1,000,000 marks that makes a profit of 150,000 marks with the average profit of 15 percent.

With an interest rate of 5% straight capitalization of income of 150,000 marks will have an estimated price of 3,000,000 marks (150,000/.05=3,000,000 marks)

A deduction of 20,000 marks for the various administration costs and directors fees would make the actual payment to shareholders 130,000 rather 150,000 marks

A risk premium of, say, 2% would be added to a fixed safe rate of interest of 5% in estimating the actual stock price

So what, then, is the stock price (130,000/.07)? 1,857,143 or roughly 1,900.000 marks

This 900,000 is free after deducting the initial investment of 1,000,000 marks

The balance of 900, 000 marks appears as promoters’ profit which arises from the conversion of profit-bearing capital into interest bearing capital.

In 1910, Hilferding called this promoters profit, an economic category sui generis; it is earned by the promoter by selling of stocks or the securitizing of income on the capital market.

For Hilferding the investment bank, which promotes the conversion of profit-bearing to interest-bearing capital, claims the promoters profit.

The analysis seems pertinent to the securitization process today, and I would love to hear Henwood’s and others’ thoughts about this.

As Roubini and Mihm have pointed out, we have seen the securitization of mortgages, consumer loans, student loans, auto loans, airplane leases, revenues from forests and mines, delinquent tax liens, radio tower loans, boat loans, state revenues, the royalties of rock bands!

We have seen, in their words, an explosion in the selling of future income of dependable projected revenue streams such as rents or interest payments on mortgage payments as securities.

That securitization been driven by investors’ quest for yield lift given the low rate of interest, itself the result of the global savings glut and Fed policy.

And it seems that Wall Street, with the connivance of the credit agencies, was able to appropriate value from the purchasers of securities by understating the risk premia. The risk premium and promoters’ profit are inversely correlated so there is a strong incentive to understate the former.

I’d be in for at least $50, maybe $100.

I’m in, $100 ante.

He’s lucky to have the copyright. Well, luck had little to do with it, I’m sure. Anyway I know an author (knew — deceased) whose book was so successful in its niche that it became a standard. At copyright renewal time, a revised edition made sense, especially since he had actually learned new things and modified some early opinions. Rewrote the intro material and the notes and index (not the main text, because it was a translated edition of a classic work in the field). Publisher wouldn’t publish it, saying that it failed peer review. The problem, they explained, was that you can’t put controversial new ideas in a classic that’s being used in university courses.

That was an academic press, not a tiny Left one. No controversies allowed. And not a third-rate Christian University or anything.

No such problem for Henwood, and remember the advice in this thread to be careful about the terms of your book deal.

I will blog it, and if it is OK with people, I will use the email addresses of those who have expressed interest in this thread to write an update …</blockquote

Henry,

There’s a very good possibility that my listed email address on this site will cease to be functional soon-ish. If and when this happens, I will of course enter a new functioning address into the required field. But if you’re planning to send an email to those who have expressed interest in contributing, would it be best if I emailed you an email address of mine that definitely won’t be expiring? (Not sure how you’ll be collecting email addresses I guess.)

Given the history of the devolution of populist agitation against “money men” or rentiers or Wall Street or bankers or investment bankers or central bankers as a synecdoche for anti-capitalist critique, I warn today as I did upon the publication of Henwood’s book of the way that it frames critique of the system. It’s neither what Boltanski and Chiapello would call a social critique nor an artistic critique. One should pause today of the cover depiction of Wall Street in cross hairs.

A fascinating example of the anchoring effect, despite Henry’s disclaimer. I’ll put in $100.

The Onion headline still holds: “Economy in Recession. New Bubble Needed”. John Cassidy or Robt Pollin recently quoted Paul Sweezy, circa 1987: “What growth the economy has experienced in recent years, apart from that attributable to an unprecedented peacetime military buildup, has been almost entirely due to the financial explosion.” By creating the securitization machine–worth perhaps $2.7 trillion in 2007 IIRC–Wall Street gave the real economy a source of growth that it could not itself generate. People understood that as long as it lasted, and that is probably why criticism of it was muted at the time.

Sign me up for $20 if the result is a free e-copy later. That’s basically just like pre-order.

I’m late to the party (and not spending much time on the web these days due to very patchy internet access) but I’d like to join the kick starter too. If Doug Henwood wants to get max audience and is (able to be) happy with a limited sum he can earn with a revised edition, I’d second the recommendation to check out unglue.it and Open Books. (though OB implicitly assumes that authors need not make a living from their writings).

Im in.