The Trouble with Prosperity

The Trouble with Prosperity is an astute, elegantly written, selective financial history of the last few decades. It sounds a cautionary note: business is inherently cyclical; every boom historically ends in a crisis; and today's relative financial prosperity in the U.S., based on relentless downsizing and low inflation, will not last. Grant suggestively argues that the U.S. financial system's dramatic recovery in the late 1980s came about through optimism generated by a stock market rally, rather than through the Federal Reserve Board's intervention, as is widely believed.