Discussions about economic justice are mostly about inequality of some sort. This book is no exception. The USA has for the last half century been an economic paradox, with its small but very deep pockets of unimaginable wealth, its promise of the “American Dream” to all who might aspire to that small group, and then the rest of the population ranging somewhere between comfortable middle class to utter destitution. The outer edges of this spectrum, unthinkable to many other more welfarist nations, have become the new and awful signature tune of an America that since 2008 has seemingly led much of the world over the fi nancial cliff. Until 2008, mortgage-backed securities were marketed around the world. They were a fi nancial product with hard-to-assess risks, but in a fi nancial market with few regulations and many political friends inside the Washington beltway, naysayers were brushed off as yesterday’s men and women. In fact, mortgage-back securities and derivatives were a key part to a more broadly-based credit boom that was feeding a global speculative bubble in real estate and equities. The USA was leading the world in a cascade of risky lending practices and overin fl ated asset prices, even while there were early signs that oil and food prices were escalating. Finally, what should have been identi fi ed as a perilous domestic and international fi nancial situation burst into major global panic in September 2008 when the US interbank loan market fell apart. Many large and well-established investment and commercial banks in the USA and Europe suffered huge losses and even faced bankruptcy.