Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the Oklahoman

Oklahoman
June 22, 2008 Sunday
City Edition

Author details financial 'High Wire'

BYLINE: Dennie Hall
SECTION: LIVING; DENNIE HALL; Pg. 9D

Things are going smoothly. Both spouses have jobs. They live in a comfortable house in the suburbs.
Then their world comes crashing down. Bam!
Maybe it's a job loss. Perhaps it's a spike in interest rates. It could be a death in the family. Likely it's a big medical bill, or maybe it is runaway inflation at a time when pay increases are nil.
Whatever the cause, author Peter Gosselin provides a scary look at the plight of average folks in "High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families" (Basic Books, $26).
Gosselin writes that Americans have had a year in which "we've had to hold our breath as one disaster after another has swept over us - the mortgage mess, the financial freeze-up and now, recession." He writes that economic risks once carried on the shoulders of business and government have shifted "to the backs of working families."
Many employers no longer provide health insurance. Families able to provide it for themselves do so at tremendous expense and often find that a co-pay - or even an insurer's refusal to pay a claim - can be financially ruinous. Some employees work and save for years toward retirement only to learn a company, such as Enron, has failed them.
With so many employers moving their operations to foreign countries, a sudden pink slip is not unusual.
"Our near-exclusive reliance on free-market principles to solve every financial and social problem has led the nation down a political and ethical dead-end," the book's publisher writes. "Now is the time for a new direction."
Gosselin helps readers understand what that direction would be. His writing is made more meaningful by use of real personalities to illustrate problems, putting a human face to the new reality of financial upheaval.
His book should be imperative reading for anyone concerned about financial woes and their causes.
Gosselin is the national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and a member of the paper's Washington bureau. He is now a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
Words on the book's cover by Mark Shields of NewsHour put it succinctly: "If you have time to read only two books this year about the condition of the country and the challenges we all face, do yourself a favor and read 'High Wire' twice."