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Understanding Real and Fake Threats to the Economy, With the Help of a Thriller Novel
What we can learn from the (mostly overblown) fears of America’s fiscal hawks
Harvard-trained attorney Michael Ginsberg’s new novel, Debt Bomb (BQB Publishing, 2021) is a warning to America of a coming fiscal catastrophe, written in the style of an international espionage thriller. I make no claims to be a literary critic. Don’t think you’re about to read a conventional book review. I will just say that there is enough action here to make you turn the pages, and in any case, I doubt that many readers pick up a book of this genre in search of subtle character development or memorable dialog.
To me, the interesting thing about Debt Bomb is not its literary merits but what it reveals about the mindset of the fiscal hawks who see America’s thirteen-figure deficits and fourteen-figure national debt as looming threats to the nation’s prosperity. Although they (and the book) get a lot of things wrong, there really are some scary possibilities in the arcane world of public finance. Follow along while I try to sort out the sense from the nonsense.
