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Product Description
The New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist reveals how the financial meltdown emerged from the toxic interplay of Washington, Wall Street, and corrupt mortgage lenders
In Reckless Endangerment, Gretchen Morgenson, the star business columnist of The New York Times, exposes how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect the country from financial harm were actually complicit in the actions that finally blew up the American economy.
Drawing on previously untapped sources and building on original research from coauthor Joshua Rosner—who himself raised early warnings with the public and investors, and kept detailed records—Morgenson connects the dots that led to this fiasco.
Morgenson and Rosner draw back the curtain on Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance giant that grew, with the support of the Clinton administration, through the 1990s, becoming a major opponent of government oversight even as it was benefiting from public subsidies. They expose the role played not only by Fannie Mae executives but also by enablers at Countrywide Financial, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, HUD, Congress, the FDIC, and the biggest players on Wall Street, to show how greed, aggression, and fear led countless officials to ignore warning signs of an imminent disaster.
Character-rich and definitive in its analysis, this is the one account of the financial crisis you must read.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #58 in Books
- Published on: 2011-05-24
- Released on: 2011-05-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Customer Reviews
We need more watchdogs like Gretchen and Josh!
I have long admired Gretchen Morgenson and cheered when she was awarded a Pulitzer. Perhaps this book in conjunction with her hard-hitting NY Times reporting will garner her another one. She deserves it. The authors echo my sentiments precisely in their introduction "...felt compelled to write this book because we are angry that the American economy was almost wrecked by a crowd of self-interested, politically influential and arrogant people who have not been held accountable for their actions." And the people who did it "...continue, even now, to hold sway in the corridors of Wall Street and Washington."
I have nothing against the vastly wealthy and sometimes - OK, frequently - dream wistfully of joining their ranks, but I do care about how this wealth is accumulated. Entrepreneurs who build companies, executives who take these companies to the next level and the one after that, highly talented and gifted persons - in arts and sports - who command premium remuneration all enrich society. Many financial titans, on the other hand, do not create wealth. They are unusually adept in extracting it for personal gain while simultaneously impoverishing society and holding it hostage. They operate on the principle that "My gain is mine and only mine. My loss is actually yours." And they know how to spread enough largesse that enablers like accountants, rating agencies and regulators fall into line and they buy off politicians with consummate skill. They try - increasingly ineffectively - to justify their existence by claiming that they perform crucial service by "allocating capital" and "increasing efficiency." They further claim that they should not be regulated because they can do a better job of regulating themselves. The fish is starting to stink pretty bad.
What makes this book a valuable read is that the authors explain exactly how this process works and they are not shy about naming names. For example, you learn how James Johnson, the erstwhile CEO of Fannie Mae built it into a colossus that gradually jettisoned all prudence in lending and vastly enriched himself and a bunch of cronies. He also suborned powerful legislators like Barney Frank, the powerful Massachusetts Democrat. And, lastly, he looked on and encouraged Wall Street firms to do the same and used that as justification to increase the scale of his own operations. And, Oh! I almost forgot, he also admonished fresh graduates to pursue their careers with "honesty and integrity". When Johnson left Fannie Mae, a senior executive recalled "...we always won, we took no prisoners and we faced little organized political opposition." He continued to be politically influential and was an adviser to the current president until forced to resign because it surfaced that he had received sweetheart loans from a leading purveyor of toxic financial junk.
Finally someone gets it!
Morgenson and Rosner have done their homework and written an in depth and hard-hitting book that reveals with perfect clarity how this mess began. It's refreshing to read a book that doesn't rehash the Wall Street stories we've all heard over and over. I'm much more interested at this point in the characters in Washington who were championing home ownership and enriching themselves as they set the stage for disaster, and who really have remained blameless up to now. The sense of outrage the authors feel comes through on every page and the book is actually a page-turner in addition to being a real narrative, unlike some of the other books on the crisis, with a beginning and an end. Great storytelling and great reporting as well. Read it!!!
Quintessential blame game
In this new look at the financial crisis of 2008, Morgenson and Rosner take and even-handed look at the corrupt corporatist system that led to such a devastating situation. The duo lashes out at Wall Street and provides an in depth look at the careless greed that went on. Most alarming was the material on Goldman Sachs concerning the fact that they made promoted mortgage securities to their clients while at the same time, invested heavily in the downfall of those securities.
Thankfully though, in contrast to Sorkin's book and the HBO special about the same subject, Reckless Endangerment doesn't just put the blame of the mortgage meltdown on Wall Street. The authors rightly finds cause in the good-intentioned busy bodies of the federal government who promoted sub-prime loans with regulation and backed with taxpayer money. Neither political party was exempt from the wrongdoing, either. The authors make that clear.
I highly recommend this book, but of course, the story is bigger than the 2000s. If you want to understand what led to the economic climate that allowed the meltdown, get the excellent Juggernaut: Why the System Crushes the Only People Who Can Save It.
