Not many us would reason that there is any difference between money and wealth. After all, the popular perception is that to be wealthy is to have lots of money. But the authors of this book, ‘Financialism: Water from an empty well’, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Brian Browne, insist that this is pure myth. Money may be the measure of wealth; it cannot be its definition. It is this conflation of money with wealth, they contend, that is responsible for the current unhealthy and even destructive transition from traditional capitalism to the reigning economic regime that they creatively christen ‘financialism’. Capitalism is a system of private ownership of the means of production and investment in creation of goods and services by the private entrepreneur for the purpose of reaping profit. Financialism on the other hand is the system of investing and speculating in money for the purpose of multiplying money for its own sake to reap mega profits. This is clearly an unorthodox book. It is suffused through and through with ‘out of the box’ thinking. Many of the views, perceptions, observations, illustrations, pontifications and prescriptions offered by the authors starkly contradict orthodox economic thinking.

But then, the authors, the former Governor of Lagos State and the former United States Consul-General in Nigeria, confess from the outset that they are neither professional economists nor academics. Is this not a draw back for the subject they have chosen to tackle? From what well of expertise, the reader may wonder, do they then draw the intellectual offerings they proffer as solutions to current economic challenges? Such a perspective, however, obviously exaggerates the scientific status and certitude of orthodox neo-liberal economics. How do we explain, for instance, the failure of orthodox economic experts to forsee the current global financial crisis, proffer policies to prevent the catastrophe and that they appear even more helpless in helping to chart a sustainable course towards a healthier, more equitable global economy? Tinubu and Browne can, therefore, rightly claim that, not imprisoned by textbook theories or mythical ideologies, their diverse life and professional experiences enable them to examine current global economic problems from fresh, more realistic perspectives.

We can thus understand their contention that money is not synonymous with wealth. Money, they explain, only underpins the creation of wealth when it facilitates the production of goods and services through which employment is generated and value added to society. Speculation and investment in the limitless multiplication of money for its own sake is, for the authors, the equivalent of constructing a sky scrapper on a foundation of nothing. It is this abnormality that defines the transition from capitalism to financialism, a development that is at the root of the current ruinous financial and economic disorder enveloping most parts of our contemporary world. In his thrilling forward to the book, Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, points out its central thrust with characteristic pungency: “It challenges the domination of print value over the material goods, a situation where the “virtual” or symbolic arbiter between commodities comes to take precedence and becomes not only valued and marketable for itself, but also tyrannizes over the enabling material base. The skewed world of economics needs to be challenged, a world where the umblical cord between produce and tally card was slashed when no one was looking”. Eminent African-American statesman, Reverend Jesse Jackson, makes the same observation when he notes in the second foreword that “The book reveals a profound fact: the dominant economic theory is more subjective than it is scientific”.


https://thenationonlineng.net/financialism-water-from-an-empty-well-1/

I need a copy of the book Financialism: Water From An Empty Well even if an used copy (if there is anything like that) to by in ibadan