Good message, important, but reads like fiction. If this guy wanted to have any serious impact he should have written something less sensational. Also, he's a jackass. He spent his whole life screwing over everybody, including his friends, and then he writes a book (for which he probably made lots of money and became famous) and we're supposed to believe this guy suddenly developed a conscience? I don't buy it.

This is garbage. Worse than that, I think this book is dangerous. First of all, I think Perkins is a total liar. I dont doubt that there are people out there that make their living by betting against developing countries, and I dont doubt that there are people who have an economic incentive for progressive third world leaders to fail. But I really doubt that the way these people ply their trade is by having beautiful blonds show young business guys (in this case, Perkins) the dark path by intellectually seducing them in Boston apartments while going around calling themselves hitmen. It really stretches the realm of the believable.And no, just because no one has called him a liar doesnt mean hes telling the truth, it means that his argument is so insanely overdrawn that serious people in positions of power do not take him seriously.Which leads me to my next point. This book is dangerous. Its dangerous because it feeds into the stupid left conspiracies that keep progressive economists impotent. There is a world wide conspiracy! They meet in dark rooms and plot our destruction! Nothing is that simple, folks, and until we give up on fairy tales and start looking at the global economy as it exists, meaning as a complicated world where many powerful people are at cross purposes and no few grand conspiracies ever come to fruition we are bound to lose.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, while purportedly the author's memoir and hard-hitting expose of his work in the "corporatocracy", reads more like a flat and repetitive mass market thriller. In the 1970s, John Perkins began working for MAIN, an international consulting firm, as an economist who developed inflated projections of development in poor countries, so that they would then become dependent on richer countries like the United States. As Perkins explains, the "corporatocracy" consists of international corporations, banks, and governments that utilize various financial and political resources to enforce and maintain the idea that all economic growth is beneficial, and futhermore, is most beneficial to those that instigate, while those who do not should be exploited. To illustrate this idea, Perkins explains his travels and work in countries such as Panama, Indonesia, and Ecuador. He also details his transition from economic hit man to concerned American citizen.For all I know, Perkins' account may be one-hundred percent true, but there were several things which I did not find convincing. He presents the idea of the corporatocracy as a novel concept, whereas anyone paying the slightest attention to world politics and history over the past fifty years is most likely already aware of the trend of a few governments, banks and corporations controlling the global arena and the victimization of poorer populations. It is difficult to trust Perkins-the-narrator, especially since he tends toward cloak-and-dagger dramatizations and also because he made a living for many years from deception and exaggeration. He claims that he was intimately involved in events such as the Saudi Arabian Money-Laundering Affair, but many of these claims are not supported by outside evidence. I also did not find Perkins to be a very sympathetic character. He continually expresses his frustration with his job in one sentence and then justifies his choice to stick with it in the next by painting a picture of himself as a victim. I don't find much of Perkins' account to be reliable, but as a semi-fictional account, more in the line of a mass-market thriller loosely based on reality, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man makes important points about the ways in which the corporatocracy works to uphold the status quo.