Our partner Jim recently read a powerful book about the Financial Crisis he believes everyone should read.
It’s called “Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon” and was written in 2011. Jim discovered the book after reading the following article by Peggy Noonan.
“Who is to Blame”
“Bernie Sanders…….. Donald Trump…….
How can 50%+ of the Americans who went to the primaries this fall even consider 1 of them?
It’s easy….. Most people feel we are in a rigged game, and they are more right than wrong.
There’s a lot to rebel against. If we want to make a serious economic and political critique, then make the one Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make in “Reckless Endangerment”: that real elites in Washington rigged the system for themselves and their friends, became rich and powerful, caused the great cratering, and then “slipped quietly from the scene.”
It is a blow-by-blow recounting of how politicians—Democrats and Republicans—passed the laws that encouraged the banks to make the loans that would never be repaid, and that would result in the loss of so many jobs. Specifically it is the story of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers, and how their politically connected CEOs, especially Fannie’s Franklin Raines and James Johnson, took actions that tanked the American economy and walked away rich. It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.
The story is a scandal, and the book should be the bible of liberals. But they seem as incapable of seeing government as part of the problem as Republicans seem of seeing business as part of the problem.”
You can buy the book on amazon here.
Reply and let us know what you think.