Hacker News Reader

Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

I can't recommend The Man Who Stole Portugal by Murray Teigh Bloom enough. I loved this book.

The most curious aspect about all this is that he seems to have had a positive influence on the Portuguese economy. It was a sort of QE. The subsequent regime locked the Portuguese economy back into its ossified ways.

View on HN

Reading the story, it seems to me that had he succeed in controling the central bank, he would be a celebrated successful businessman and Portugal would have been much better off.

I also find it interesting that the people who caused his downfalls were acting legally but, in my view, were at least as morally corrupt as him. They were poweful, rich men using their power, political ties, their journals and journalist to vilify them and acting to protect their monopolies. It just reinforces the fact that law, right and wrong are not very well tied together. They're mostly there to keep the status quo for the elite.

I had the same thought about quantitative easing. Because he used the money to make so much investment, he was single-handedly modifying Portugal's monetary policy, which, had he succeeded, may have permanently stimulated the economy. When reading about what the authorities did in the wake of his discovery, I thought, "that's exactly the kind of action you'd take if you wanted to precipitate a recession." I wonder what would have happened if they'd confiscated his ill-gotten assets but still retroactively legitimized the injection of new money, and swept the whole thing under the rug?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com