Type: Nonfiction, Business & Investing
My rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Why I chose it: I am very interested in the current economic crisis and enjoy reading other people's perspective on what they think caused it.
What I liked about it: There are many contributing factors that led to this economic crisis. The author delves into the loose lending standards especially in the area of sub-prime lending, the financial innovations that were used to sell junk mortgages to sophisticated investors, and the rating agencies who assumed that because housing prices historically always went up that they would continue to always go up. What makes this book a bit more entertaining is that the author is an economics reporter for the New York Times and gets himself into financial trouble with his own mortgage.
I was disappointed that the author blamed many different groups of people but did not lay the ultimate blame on the institution that provided the source of the cash to make it all possible -- the Federal Reserve.
If you're a teacher and leave a big bowl of chocolates in the middle of a room full of 1st graders and leave the room for 15 minutes then come back and the kids are bouncing off the walls, you cannot then say "What happened?" That is exactly what Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, said about the busting of the housing bubble.
None of the housing boom could have been possible without the Federal Reserve providing the big bowl of chocolate (i.e. money) for those 1st graders (i.e. lenders/borrowers/investors). There's no doubt that investment bubbles can form from time-to-time. But the bubbles will be limited in size to the amount of money available. The Fed essentially made an unlimited amount of money available following the dot-com bust in 2000 and the events of September 11, 2001 by lowering interbank interest rates to 1% from June 2003 to June 2004. Aside from that one-year period, interest rates in the United States have not been at 1 percent, or below, since 1958.
Imagine the bubble which is now being formed by the Fed lowering interest rates to essentially 0% back in December 2008 and holding it at that level ever since.
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