ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE; The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
NEW YORK TIMES – BOOKS: Two of our finest business journalists have written a thorough account of the origins of the financial crisis of 2008. More than offering just a backward look, it helps explain the most troubling business headlines of the moment, as well as those that are certain to come. For starters, there is the unfolding foreclosure-paperwork fiasco. Next up will be a clash over whether big banks should be forced to take back billions of dollars in contaminated mortgages they sold. Down the road, we will no doubt confront the danger of the next asset bubble inflating as a result of the Federal Reserve’s use of extreme monetary policy to stimulate the economy. These continuing and future problems are all symptoms of a larger syndrome whose origins Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera ably chronicle in “All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.”
The title alludes to a line in “The Tempest” (“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here”), and fiends surely abound: subprime sleaze kings; bonus-happy Wall Street plutocrats; and, of course,Alan Greenspan, the fallen maestro of the Federal Reserve, whose see-no-evil free-market ideology made a virtue of unchecked financial recklessness
For those readers who have not immersed themselves in the murky tale of the way dubious housing finance became entangled with Wall Street’s casino culture, McLean and Nocera offer as legible an overview as exists. McLean, a former Goldman Sachs employee, writes for Vanity Fair and was the author, with Peter Elkind, of an insightful book about the Enron scandal called “The Smartest Guys in the Room.” Nocera is a business columnist for The New York Times and, like McLean, a former longtime staff member at Fortune… (more)
