'Bad Money' by Kevin Phillips - Los Angeles Times

Still, "Bad Money" isn't entirely lacking in those. Who knew, for example, that former KGB agent Vladimir Putin earned the Russian equivalent of a doctorate from a prestigious St. Petersburg mining institute and that the dissertation he defended there dealt with the exploitation of natural resources as an engine of national development? As Phillips glancingly but provocatively suggests, knowing that tells us something instructive about Putin's transformation of Russia into a global oil titan, as well as about his aspirations for further development of a polar oil field with resources that may exceed Saudi Arabia's. (Phillips hasn't lost his talent for phrase making, and "kommissar kapitalism" seems a particularly apt description of Putin's Russia.)

Because he knows the territory in a deep and reflective way, Phillips has a keen eye for the relevant historical quotation. America's recent economic folly, for example, is neatly summarized in a remark that the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, made in 1904 to a smug group of his country's financiers: "Granted that you are the clearinghouse of the world, [but] are you entirely beyond anxiety as to the permanence of your great position? . . . Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth."