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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. ( )

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

This book is less than satisfactory. If you are looking for causes for the current "credit crunch" and economic crisis this book will give it to you, but if you are looking for REAL causes than find another book. This author manages to explain our economic problems, without addressing the root causes, such as the fraudulent Federal Reserve. It's all fluff and no content. If you want to read a book that is more than assessing damage, read Peter Schiff or anything by the Mises Institute. ( )

Given my overly simplistic overview of global financial history (barter system, agrarian, industrial, Adam Smith, Reaganomics and here we are), I found this overview both informative and deeply, deeply disturbing. Best analogy I can think of: sadistic serial killers too squeamish at the sight of blood to do the job properly instead find their niche on Wall Street - time and time again you read of men without a shred of conscience devising means to deprive everyone else of their hard-earned life savings to make themselves rich and powerful - to the point where we've basically re-created the robber baron class of the Victorian era. If the elderly lose their life savings in the process, if they lose their ability to afford basics like food or medicine, so much the better. And when these guys' schemes collapse - as they inevitably do, time and time again - they simply start over and do it again, because in our society, no one is stopping them. Compare that to Pete Rose being banned from baseball for life - and you wonder: why aren't these guys banned from running investment funds for life, if they've sent millions of investors to the poor house without so much as blinking? But they never are. Example: John Meriweather (LCTM) after nearly precipitating a global meltdown in 2000 much like this one and having to be bailed out by the feds "was soon raising new money and is now the general partner of JWM investors, a $2.6 billion hedge fund". And that's just one example of too many to count.

You realize, reading the history of one financial meltdown after another, that Congress is really hosting those "investigations" for show, and that's all. There is no intent to reform the process, because too many of them make too much money with things the way they are. And if the rest of us go down the tubes in the process, if we lose our savings and our jobs and our homes, so much the better.

Well written and researched, but a really depressing book.