We're pleased to have Kevin Phillips blogging this week at TPMCafe about his new book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.

In it he propounds his thesis for why the current global economic crisis threatens to undermine U.S. economic leadership and points to a convergence of factors which have emerged since the 1980s: massive public and private debt and repeated government bailouts of the financial sector, among them.