Library Journal
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McLean (The Smartest Guys in the Room) and New York Times reporter Nocera offer perhaps the best account of the 2007-08 financial crisis for hard-core business readers. In addition to examining the careers of well-known players like Angelo Mozilo, Lloyd Blankfein, and Alan Greenspan, they also investigate lesser-known financiers such as Moody's former president Brian Clarkson and Fannie Mae's Franklin Raines. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A closely written account of the late financial meltdown, when, in the words of one analyst, "we went from a collective belief in soundness to a collective belief in insolvency."That change of attitude is entirely understandable, inasmuch as the financial system was predicated on abstractions. The origins of the meltdown and the subsequent Great Recession, write former Fortune and current Vanity Fair contributor McLean (co-author: The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, 2003) andNew York Timesreporter Nocera (A Piece of the Action : How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class, 1994), largely lie in the speculator's dream called the mortgage-backed security, which "allowed Wall Street to scoop up loans made to people who were buying homes, bundle them together by the thousands, and then resell the bundle, in bits and pieces, to investors." This innovation netted fortunes for the players at the top, undoing the former bond between buyer and seller and leading directly to the rise of the subprime industry and its toxic holdings. Ironically, write the authors, the securitizing of mortgages was not an invention of Wall Street but of government, with the federal agencies Ginnie Mae and then Freddie Mac selling securities 40 years ago. Scrupulously fair, McLean and Nocera look inside the closed doors of agencies, some now extinct, such as Bear Stearns and Countrywide, which took the official rhetoric, shared by George Bush and Bill Clinton alike, that there is something near-sacred about homeownership and ran with it. Interestingly, the authors attribute the failed policing of the subprime industry, whose criminal business practices were the engine of the meltdown, to a very real fear on the part of the government that cracking down would harm the people who most needed help. Those little fish were soon swallowed up by the Wall Street sharks, who sagely played the odds to the end, when it finally became apparent that the system was being hit by a perfect storm far beyond the worst of worst-case scenarios.Hard-hitting reporting and fluent writing bring the utter devastation of the Great Recession to lifewith John Cassidy'sHow Markets Fail (2009) an essential aid to understanding where all the money went, and who benefited.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

In this well-written narrative, two knowledgeable, skilled business reporters (Forbes, Vanity Fair, New York Times) cover the evolution of housing finance and its effects for several decades preceding September 2008. They consider government encouragement of house ownership; the invention of new financial instruments (securitization of mortgages); bubbles in house prices (and mortgage refinancing); lax lending standards (liars', no-doc, NINJA, and no-down-payment loans to those who should not have borrowed); misestimates of risk (rating agencies); sloppy recordkeeping as loans were transferred; woes of financial institutions (banks, hedge funds); and the expensive (to the US Treasury) bailouts of financial institutions judged too big to fail (because bankruptcies would have frozen capital flows--systemic failure of financial markets--as actually happened briefly when Lehman failed). The authors provide enough financial details to support the narrative without burdening the nonfinancial reader. They include the major players (e.g., Fuld, Bernanke, Paulson, Mozilo, O'Neil, Greenspan) and institutions (Bear Stearns, Lehman, J.P. Morgan, AIG). Blame is everywhere and is judiciously evaluated: banks, government, rating agencies, borrowers, lenders. Smoothly written, this is the best of the general volumes on the mortgage crisis. No bibliography or footnotes but occasional text citations. Based on contemporaneous reports and many interviews. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; all levels of students; practitioners. R. A. Miller emeritus, Wesleyan University