Word: batra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...impending economic disaster, written by a Chinese. At most chain bookstores, the personnel might be equally baffled. But the staffer at Politics & Prose thinks for a moment, and then, from among the shop's 20,000 titles, quickly produces a copy of The Great Depression of 1990 by Ravi Batra -- not a Chinese, to be sure, but the right book nonetheless. Sold...
...NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN. Quite the opposite, but everything's coming up profits anyway for doomsayer Ravi Batra, 45, the economics professor at Southern Methodist University who wrote The Great Depression of 1990. First published by a small press in 1985 and then by Simon & Schuster in June 1987, the book sold more than 500,000 copies in hard cover. His promptly produced sequel, Surviving the Great Depression of 1990, was released last month with a first printing...
Charting the possible scenarios for trouble has become a growth industry. The Great Depression of 1990, an offbeat work by the heretofore little-known economist Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, has perched on the New York Times best-seller list for twelve weeks and has sold more than 300,000 copies. Competing doomsday books bear such titles as Blood in the Streets (a how-to manual for crisis investing), The Panic of '89 (a fictional thriller about global financial follies) and The National Debt (an indictment of America's borrowing habits...
...distribution of income has tended to wind up unevenly slanted toward the rich. In 1929 1% of U.S. families held 36.3% of the wealth; the proportion fell as low as 20.8% in 1949 but rose back to 34.3% by 1983, Economist Batra notes in The Great Depression of 1990. That disparity is dangerous, he contends, because banks with idle money are tempted to make shaky loans to financially strapped customers, while the rich tend to make increasingly risky investments in search of ever larger returns...
...Batra's thesis turns on his highly questionable contention that an inexorable cycle brings a depression every 60 years or so. To be sure, Batra is not alone in his gloomy outlook. Many other thinkers, including Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, have drawn comparisons between the perils of 1929 and today. Few of them would agree, however, with Batra's position that an uncontrollable calamity is inevitable...