Unless you’re an economics wonk, finance books can be excrutiatingly boring. And when they’re not preternaturally soporific, they often have something else going for them, like a gimmick, a little humor, an overriding story or, in the very worst case, a fable or parable featuring a nest full of anthropomorphic vermin.
But that’s often not enough. Here are four new books dealing with current financial issues and achieving mixed results:
Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy.
Barry Ritholtz.
Wiley. 332 pages.
Over the past decade, a diverse assemblage of bloggers have established themselves as a self-appointed truth squad for the so-called ”mainstream media,” though most of them draw from the MSM for actual reporting and content. A few, however, consistently provide some original material. Among the more worthwhile blogs is The Big Picture, a blunt but stylish one presented by economist Barry Ritholtz, whose daily analysis is a mandatory stop within the blogosphere.
His new book expands upon many of the themes he has already hit upon online, but in this package, there’s more space for him stretch out and provide a more thoughtful and expansive look at our current economic and political messes.
Source:
Economics stories can be unexciting, but recent books try to keep their readers awake.
RICHARD PACHTER
Miami Herald, Monday, 06.01.09
HTTP://WWW.MIAMIHERALD.COM/BUSINESS/STORY/1074231.HTML
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Book Review: Bailout Nation
Written by Damien Hoffman
Posted on 30 May 2009
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/?p=160
“Required Reading for Every US Citizen”
As of the end of spring 2009, I still get carpet bombed with the same question: “How did this financial crisis happen?” No matter how many times I repeat the same two minute recap, apparently people need to see the facts in print (to their credit, the story does have a lot of actors, locations, and other variables). Alas, the savior to your dry mouth and bewildered faces has arrived: Barry Ritholtz’s Bailout Nation.
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Highlights from the Bloomberg review of Bailout Nation:
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“A valuable new contribution to our understanding of how we arrived at this sorry juncture.”
“If you’re looking for an all-in-one place explanation of what went wrong and why, this is the book for you (or your confused neighbor).”
“Smart, sassy and often amusing.”
“Ritholtz waltzes the reader though the decisions and missteps that landed us in this morass.”
“His verdict on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is as astute as it is merciless.”
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Source:
Greenspan Flunks Test, Bush Falls Into $15 Trillion Pit: Books
Review by James Pressley
Bloomberg, May 27 2009
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=amoZezYyYwFA
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ABC:
“How long does it take to explain how the U.S. government has ended up spending billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to bail out some of the country’s largest, most well-known corporations?
If you check with bailout critic and Fusion IQ chief executive Barry Ritholtz, the answer is about 300 pages. “Bailout Nation, Ritholtz’s new book, “points fingers and lays the blame at a number of places,” the author told ABCNews.com.
“Now that the worst of the crisis is over, we need to start thinking about how this happened and how we can prevent it from happening again in the future,” Ritholtz said. “It’s important not only that we avoid repeating the mistake but we figure out the causes of this and then start setting about repairing the damage that was done.”
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Source:
‘Self-Inflicted Damage’: Highlights From ‘Bailout Nation’
New Book From Bailout Critic Barry Ritholtz Takes on Citigroup, Chrysler and More
ALICE GOMSTYN
ABC NEWS Business Unit, May 27, 2009
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=7681437&page=1
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Greenspan Flunks Test, Bush Falls Into $15 Trillion Pit: Books
Review by James Pressley
May 27 (Bloomberg)
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Let’s pause for a minute and think about $15 trillion.
That’s roughly how much money the U.S. has committed toward rescuing the economy from the credit meltdown, housing collapse and recession, according to the number-crunching of Barry Ritholtz, chief executive officer of research firm FusionIQ.
Find that figure hard to grasp? Ritholtz has some handy comparisons: In inflation-adjusted terms, $15 trillion is more than the U.S. spent on the Louisiana Purchase, he says. It’s bigger than the Marshall Plan. More money than the government paid for the Race to the Moon, the savings-and-loan crisis, the Vietnam War — or all of the above combined, he says.
“The only event in American history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II,” Ritholtz explains in “Bailout Nation,” a bracing look at how a country of self-reliant individualists became what he calls “a nanny state for well paid bankers.”
Another book on the financial crisis, you ask? Hasn’t the subject been bludgeoned to death? Surprisingly, no. Ritholtz makes a valuable new contribution to our understanding of how we arrived at this sorry juncture.
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“Bailout Nation” By Barry Ritholtz: Book Review
Published May 25th, 2009
http://www.tradersnarrative.com/bailout-nation-by-barry-ritholtz-book-review-2602.html
Since I got my hands on my copy of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, I’ve been devouring it almost non-stop.
Written by Barry Ritholtz, Director of Equity Research at Fusion IQ, and blogger at The Big Picture, it promised to be a definitive guide to the financial mess – and it didn’t disappoint.
In his inimitable colloquial tone Ritholtz sets out to meticulously explain how the stage was set for the historic unraveling of the global economy in 2008. Although we will no doubt have a plethora of similar books, Ritholtz’s book, for its detailed historical approach and its comprehensiveness will probably end up being the encyclopaedia that future historians and traders come back to.
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The Strange Death of American Capitalism
Book Review of Bailout Nation by Barry Ritholtz
Eddy Elfenbein,
Crossing Wall Street, May 17, 2009
Book Review of Bailout Nation by Barry Ritholtz
In The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield famously described how the British Liberal Party—and by extension, England’s once-unshakable faith in liberalism—suddenly and unexpectedly vanished. Despite its outward appearance of solidity, once liberalism was challenged, it crumbled to dust. How could a faith that was so dominant for so long, suddenly disappear; not only die quickly—indeed with a whimper—but do so without putting up any resistance?
These are similar questions future historians will have when they look back at the first decade of twenty-first century America. At the dawn of the new millennium, America’s faith in capitalism was also unshakable. Yet, within a few short weeks in 2008, the entire edifice came crashing down. Even voting didn’t seem to matter. First under a Republican administration and then under a Democratic one, large sectors of the economy received unprecedented amounts of government support. A staggering $15 trillion of taxpayer money has been put on the line.
The American economy reached its humiliating nadir at Davos earlier this year when our fiscal profligacy was criticized by the Wen Jiabao, the premier of what was once-called Red China. Worst of all, he was right.
What Happened?
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