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The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
written by Charles R. Morris
Studio : PublicAffairs
by PublicAffairs
Release Date : 2009-02-09
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Released : 2009-02-09
Availability : Not yet published and eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9781586486914
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 73 reviews)
List Price : $13.95
Our Price : $11.16
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Product Description |
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Now fully updated with the latest financial developments, this is the bestselling book that briefly and brilliantly explains how we got into the economic mess that is the Credit Crunch. With the housing markets unravelling daily and distress signals flying throughout the rest of the economy, there is little doubt that we are facing a fierce recession. In crisp, gripping prose, Charles R. Morris shows how got into this mess. He explains the arcane financial instruments, the chicanery, the policy mis-judgments, the dogmas, and the delusions that created the greatest credit bubble in world history.Paul Volcker slew the inflation dragon in the early 1980s, and set the stage for the high performance economy of the 1980s and 1990s. But Wall Street's prosperity soon tilted into gross excess. The astronomical leverage at major banks and their hedge fund and private equity clients led to massive disruption in global markets. A quarter century of free-market zealotry that extolled asset stripping, abusive lending, and hedge fund secrecy will go down in flames with it. Continued denial and concealment could cause the crisis to stretch out for years, but financial and government leaders are still downplaying the problem. The required restructuring will be at least as painful as the very difficult period of 1979-1983. "The Two Trillion-Dollar Meltdown", updated to include the latest financial developments, is indispensable to understanding how the world economy has been put on the brink. |
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Superficial |
I don't know why I expected a better book to be written about the crisis we are still in, but I did.
I found this book to be superficial. It is a small book and it spread itself too thin and tried to comment on too much without any depth. |
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Best synthesis I have seen yet |
Friends and colleagues have been asking me repeatedly what is going on. This book helped me give reasonable answers, and I have recommended it to everyone who has asked. Mr. Morris speaks with the authority of an insider and conveys his knowledge in clear, direct language. Don't expect the juicy gossip and anecdotes that some other recent books on this topic have used to entice readers. This book is hard-nosed and business-like. And yet, still eminently readable.
I was trained as an economist and have sustained a reverence (religious tone intended) for free markets and deregulation for most of my professional career. As a professional economist, I have some quibbles with some of Mr. Morris's explanations. They feel oversimplified and supported more by conviction than by a subtle analysis of the facts at hand. That said, taken as a whole, his analysis is much more sophisticated than that which any economist could offer if he stayed within his own discipline's boundaries. Mr. Morris points out things that I would not even think to look for. And at the end of the day, common sense favors most of his broader explanations. He brings us the kind of book you always hope to write, in which the reader reacts in an a-ha! moment: of course he's right--how else could it be?! But few readers will have grasped how obvious the answers are before reading Mr. Morris's book. With great disappointment, I bow to his verdict that free markets have not policed themselves as I would have expected and that, as a result, increased regulatory oversight will be required, despite the risks it brings.
I am not saying that I endorse all his explanations. And the book sort of comes apart at the end, in a series of asides that have little to do with his core messages and his core concerns. But this book has helped me understand today's financial crisis far better than anything else I have encountered. As I read it a second time, I am getting still more. Each of us has to build his own understanding; Mr. Morris has made that immeasurably easier for me.
Don't leave home without it! |
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A Guided Tour Through Disaster |
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This is a wonderful book for organizing the unfolding train wreck that is the world economy in late 2008. The author explains what forces led to the situation, how financiers and mathematicians used computer modeling to create complex, world-spanning organizations that led to quick, juicy profits, and how the assumptions upon which these structures were based denied the liklihood of sufficient risk to destroy the whole structure. It is a quick read but heavy on acronyms. I found a second reading helped after I had gotten used to the language and jargon. I thought the book was exceptionally helpful for fleshing out the nightly news sound bites and clearly explaining what the bankers have really been up to. |
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Fantastic Primer for Beginners |
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If terms like CDOs, tranches, CDS, LIMBOR, and SIVs throw you for a loop, this is a great book to get up to speed. Charles R. Morris puts the credit crunch in its context in 169 succinct pages. He's a former banker and he doesn't waste your time. Sure, it could have been longer, but then it wouldn't be as easy to read. The scariest thing about this book is it was written BEFORE the panic we are witnessing, but it accurately predicted it. It took the rest of us a lot longer to see the impossible hole we had dug ourselves into. I'm sorry to say that by then, it was already too late. |
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A Page Turner |
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I just happened to pick up this book at the library, and now I can't put it down. It describes, in a succint and clear manner, exactly how we got into the current financial crisis. I'm recommending it to everyone I know. |
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