Overview

Growing up in an African American working-class family in the Midwest, Jon Jeter watched the jobs undergirding a community disappear. As a journalist for the Washington Post (twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist), he reported on the freemarket reforms of the IMF and the World Bank, which in a single generation created a transnational underclass.Led by the United States, nations around the world stopped making things and starting buying them, imbibing a risky cocktail of deindustrialization, privatization, and anti-inflationary monetary policy. Jeter gives the consequences of abstract economic policies a human face, and shows how our chickens are coming home to roost in the form of the subprime mortgage scandal, the food crisis, and the fraying of traditional social bonds (marriage). From Rio de Janeiro to Shanghai to Soweto to Chicago’s South Side and Washington, DC, Jeter shows us how the economic prescriptions of “the Washington Consensus” have only deepened poverty—while countries like Chile and Venezuela have flouted the conventional wisdom and prospered.

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9780393350012

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Reviews

Flat Broke is a brilliant and much-needed assessment of how globalization, neoliberalism, the World Bank, IMF and the other tools of modern empire-building caused the current global economic crisis. And then Jeter goes deeper. He demonstrates that today's international resistance movements, led by a number of Latin American nations, offer hope for a future that will no longer exclude peasants, blue-collar workers, and the 3 billion people presently living below the poverty line--a sustainable and just future our children will want to inherit. --John Perkins, New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Author Information

Jon Jeter was the Washington Post bureau chief for southern Africa from 1999 to 2003, and the Post’s bureau chief for South America from 2003 to 2004. He now lives in Brooklyn.

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