This is both the first book I've read on the Obama presidency, and the first book I've read by Ron Suskind, and it has left me feeling slightly ambiguous about both. Confidence Men isn't just a book about the Obama phenomenon - it jumps repeatedly back and forth between Wall Street and Washington, u

My liberal friends have two views of President Barack Obama, the first African American to be elected President. The most cynical view is that Obama was always a “Trojan horse,” talking liberal talk while always basically aligned with the interests of corporate America and Wall Street. A more sympat

First, it struck me as strange to be reading a book about a sitting president’s cabinet. It felt like a forced telescoping (microscoping?) of history. I still have mixed feelings about this. I have never read a book like this before (one about a sitting president’s cabinet). It felt lurid. I couldn’

This book by an award-winning author, the first who had inside access to the Obama White House, names names of culprits in the greatest failure of the American financial system since the Great Depression and how they worked to enrich themselves while building a bubble economy that produced little un

This has got to be one of the most infuriating books ever written. First, the author knows nothing, and I mean nothing, about the basic economics that underpins the whole debate the book is putatively about. He confuses bank assets with liabilities, the "multiplier effect" with consumption spending,

Four and a half stars.

While I thought this would be a political inside-the-mind-of-the-advisors type of book, there's quite a bit of The Big Short (Michael Lewis) in here too; an explanation of the Wall Street shenanigans that led to the near-collapse of the US economy. Suskind has to spend time get