Blood Bankers: Tales From the Global Underground Economy – James S. Henry

Blood Bankers: Tales From the Global Underground Economy – James S. Henry, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003, 417 pp. (S) ***

This is an exhaustive text that bombards the reader with so many facts, figures, and statistics, that one might well begin to believe he’s reading a calculator. A functional familiarity with both macro and micro economics would do the reader well, for this is no work for the casual perusing. The broader theme of how international banking institutions have extracted the wealth and resources via mostly duplicitous fiscal measures, from the developing world over the past fifty years, is far more gripping than when the investigations become bogged down in the minutiae of numbers. Among the examples or rather targets of economic exploitation that Henry cites are the Phillipines, Brazil, Nicaragua – which probably reads as the most upsetting, given the promise of the Sandinista revolution and how the country has since become one of the poorest in the hemisphere, Argentina, and Chile. Were I an economist, I certainly would be able to provide a much more extensive and informed critique. Be that as it is, I can’t recommend this book to the lay reader. I will add that one glaring omission in the text is how the international narcotics trade figures into illicit banking practices (i.e. the laundering of billions of dollars), a connection that others have made. There is only cursory mention of the infamous BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), a bank that laundered great amounts, and according to some, served as a front for covert operations, if not a credit source, and which imploded in the early 1990s. Henry, though, does deserve credit for covering the Banco Nacional del Lavoro fiasco, where billions in USDA subsidies and credits were funneled through its Atlanta office to finance Saddam Hussein’s military. Finally, the notation, at thirty-three pages, is meticulous and it is clear that a great amount of effort and research has gone into the work. Given this, it’s a shame that it doesn’t have a more wider appeal outside of the fields of economics, mathematics, and statistics. Either that, or it’s high time we all began brushing up on our economic history.