Breakingviews

Review: Walking cure for cash-strapped U.S. cities

By Martin Langfield
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Many American cities, from Detroit to San Bernardino, are under financial pressure. Jeff Speck, an urban planner, has a suggestion: make them more pedestrian-friendly. His book “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time” makes the case. Provide it, and they will come.

Review: Stockman polemic gloomily convincing

By Martin Hutchinson

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

David Stockman is a polemicist. “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America”, the new book by the former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and private equity magnate, is a tirade, arguing over more than 700 pages that crony capitalism and central planning have increasingly corrupted U.S. policy since the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

Review: The Robespierres of central banking

By Dominic Elliott

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The most lasting inheritance of the 2008 financial crisis may be a change in the purpose of central banks. From the 1980s until 2007, most believed that monetary authorities should primarily use a policy interest rate to combat inflation. Interventions in the markets or in the financial system were outside the remit, or so the orthodox view went. Neil Irwin’s “The Alchemists” shows how that thinking has been turned on its head.

Review: Seeing through bankers’ woolly thinking

By George Hay

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

How much capital do banks need? Ask the Basel Committee of global banking supervisors, and it will recommend 3 percent of total bank assets. Ask tougher observers like the UK’s banking commission, and you’ll hear 4 percent. But ask Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, the economists behind The Bankers’ New Clothes, and you’re in for a shock: they’re after 30 percent.

Review: Bending over backwards to lean in

By Megan Miller
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” isn’t a self-help guide, corporate charter or memoir. The Facebook chief operating officer claims it’s not a feminist manifesto, either. It’s more of an amalgamation of all these genres. It ranges from intensely personal and insightful to didactic and methodical. Quoted research into how women measure themselves in the workplace and at home underpins a central Sandberg proposition – that women need to be more ambitious and men more accommodating.

Review: The massacre of Britain at Bretton Woods

By Martin Hutchinson

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Benn Steil calls his study “The Battle of Bretton Woods” but in reality the 1944 conference which created a new financial system after World War Two was more of a massacre of British interests by the U.S. Treasury’s Harry Dexter White.

Review: Conscious companies can revive capitalism

By Daniel Indiviglio
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Free markets often get the blame for such troubling outcomes as inequality, corporate scandals and economic crises. In “Conscious Capitalism,” Whole Foods co-founder and co-CEO John Mackey and business professor Raj Sisodia argue that economic liberty needs a reboot.

Review: How economics became the hijacked science

By Olaf Storbeck

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

There’s no lack of books on the shortcomings of mainstream economics. “Economists and the Powerful”, by Norbert Haering, a German financial journalist, and Niall Douglas, an Irish IT consultant, stands out from the crowd.

Review: The real story of Bo Xilai’s ruin

By Peter Thal Larsen

(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

Sometime in the next few months, Bo Xilai is expected to stand trial in the most high-profile political prosecution in China for over three decades. The former Chongqing party chief, once a contender to join the inner core of China’s leadership, stands accused of corruption, abuse of power and – more prosaically – “improper sexual relations” with women.

Review: A spy’s eye in the workplace

By Martin Langfield

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

James Bond fans would expect a former spy’s book of business tips to offer a crash-course in whiz-bang gadgetry, car chases and stealing secrets. Intelligence nerds might want to read about working the “dark side” through Dumpster-diving, coercion and other black arts. J.C. Carleson’s book “Work Like a Spy” smartly does neither.