How come we are deep in mountains of shit? What are the reason of the financial meltdown?
Here's some suggestions, from the roaring nineties of the new democrat bill clinton.
Stiglitz is smart indeed, but this book is somehow badly written. ( )

If only more people, in Washington and on Wall Street, had read this book when it was published; Stiglitz nails many of the deep root causes of the current economic malaise in this history of the 90's boom. His explanations can be pedantic, but are never overly steeped in theory. A great deal of his argument is common sense, but like a true academic (he is a Nobel Prize-winning economist) Stiglitz lays out lots of what's wrong with our current deregulated financial markets.

Stiglitz's arguements, so strong on the economy, are not helped by his uninspired attempts at an "inside baseball" look at economic policy-making in the Clinton White House. Quick to claim that his advice would have kept us out of the lurch, Stiglitz fails to offer much insight into how his seemingly great advice was so regularly turned down by decision-makers. If you read focused on the broad economic insight and not on the politics, this is a decent high-level survey of what went wrong in the boom economy of the late 90's. ( )