Debt's Dominion. . - Protection racket: how bankruptcy went from saving the average Joe to shielding the CEO - book review

Washington Monthly, March, 2002 by David Cay Johnston

Again and again, Skeel tells the reader what he is going to argue or what he has just argued, an annoying device that fills at least 1 percent of his book. He mentions bimetallism, but wastes no words explaining the reasons that a monetary system based on silver and gold could have resulted in inflation that benefited debtors and hurt creditors in the late 19th century, a major issue at the time of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech.

Skeel cites neither the Currency Act of 1792, which made bimetallism government policy for the next 141 years, nor the discovery of the Comstock Lode, whose rich veins flooded the late 19th century world with so much silver that it altered the relative prices of the two precious metals. Without context, what he writes on bimetallism is worthless. Unfortunately, the totality of what the reader gets from Debt's Dominion is almost unimaginable: a history that is a historical.

That an undergraduate would hand in such a sloppily written, disorganized, and half-baked mess is reality. That a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania would do so, and that Princeton University Press would publish it along with the author's encomium to his editor, is sad evidence of another kind of bankruptcy at both academic institutions.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, a reporter for THE NEW YORK TIMES, Won the Pulitzer Prize last April for his coverage of inequities and Loopholes in the tax system.