The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great…

A good place to start to get a grasp of the global financial crisis and what led up to the current global economic situation. Don't worry if you don't have a finance or economic background, you'll still get the gist of what led to the crises, and how the housing bubble and credit crunch is effecting the economy currently. Morris not only presents the problem but also gives some suggestions for its recovery. It does get somewhat technical in some of the chapters, but I don't think the author could have "dumbed it down" (for lack of a better term)any further. ( )

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This is not "a quickie book,” but is based on research from the late 1990s that led Morris to understand the scope of the crisis. ( )

This book gives an excellent, although sometimes a little bit daunting (for the layperson) introduction how we got ourselves into the current economic mess. It also details previous crashes (1987, 1994 etc) and shows that our dear financial gurus and politicians did not learn a thing from these previous disasters, but instead barreled ahead doing more of the same at ever greater complexity. It is astounding, as Morris details with considerable wit, how clearly highly intelligent people can be so utterly stupid when greed takes a hold of them. It is even more astounding how they have been aided and abetted by the Fed, and how we are sacrificing the future of the largest economy on the planet on the altar of the 'free market'. A MUST read. ( )

It is now December 2008 and I have just bought and started reading this book. I also just finished Ferguson's The Ascent of Money which covers much of the same ground for last year up until publication date in the spring. Both authors predicted what was going to happen, but not the drastic result. There will have to be a new edition or a sequel that will be like books about the tulip bubble and similar events of the past several hundred years.

This from an Amazon review quoting the Economist. Right on target
"However up to date it may seem, this book is no rush job. Morris deftly joins the dots between the Keynesian liberalism of the 1960s, the crippling stagflation of the 1970s and the free-market experimentation of the 1980s and 1990s, before entering the world of ultra-cheap money and financial innovation gone mad... [Morris's] provocative book is...a well-aimed opening shot in a debate that will only grow louder in coming months."—Economist, March 6, 2008