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The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
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Sales rank 200,803
Customers rating (based on 119 reviews)
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Previously published as The Trillion Dollar Meltdown Now fully updated with the latest financial developments, this is the bestselling book that briefly and brilliantly explains how we got into the economic mess that is the Credit Crunch. With the housing markets unravelling daily and distress signals flying throughout the rest of the economy, there is little doubt that we are facing a fierce recession. In crisp, gripping prose, Charles R. Morris shows how got into this mess. He explains the arcane financial instruments, the chicanery, the policy misjudgments, the dogmas, and the delusions that created the greatest credit bubble in world history. Paul Volcker slew the inflation dragon in the early 1980s, and set the stage for the high performance economy of the 1980s and 1990s. But Wall Street's prosperity soon tilted into gross excess. The astronomical leverage at major banks and their hedge fund and private equity clients led to massive disruption in global markets. A quarter century of free-market zealotry that extolled asset stripping, abusive lending, and hedge fund secrecy will go down in flames with it. Continued denial and concealment could cause the crisis to stretch out for years, but financial and government leaders are still downplaying the problem. The required restructuring will be at least as painful as the very difficult period of 1979-1983. The Two Trillion-Dollar Meltdown, updated to include the latest financial developments, is indispensable to understanding how the world economy has been put on the brink.
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| Publisher | PublicAffairs | | Release date | 02/2009 | | Availability | Usually ships in 24 hours | | Edition | Paperback |
| | List price | $13.95 | | Our price | $11.16 (you save 20.00%) | | Used price | from $0.01 |
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 Well Written
Well written, but somewhat dismissive of major economic movements-kind of a "what goes around comes around" attitude.
Very Best Introduction to Our Financial Situation
First published in February, 2008, this short and well-written book walks the reader through the history and terminology of the finance industry, focusing on what you need to know, describing what went wrong and advocating changes to correct the situation and reduce the risks and severity of future disasters.
The author is direct and opinionated in his analysis, conclusions and recommendations. Some of his conclusions do rub the ideologues of the "free market" the wrong way, but he is no radical seeking to undercut the benefits of capitalism. Like a growing number of industry, academic and political critics, he clearly sees that the economy is subject to business cycles, innovation leads to testing of limits, greed leads to further excess, regulators often lag behind the regulated, and that the political and regulatory worlds are subject to capture by the regulated. He describes how high leverage and misunderstanding of risk is a ubiquitous feature of financial markets, even by the professionals. The incentives to make more money can blind even the "best and the brightest".
This is a quick and enjoyable read for the story it tells and the support it provides for modest financial industry regulation changes to improve transparency, improve the role of counterparties, increase independence and banish the myth of the self-regulating free market, at least with respect to the finance industry.
 Leaves out half the story
I can't share the enthusiasm of the other readers. Though Morris' writing style is lucid, he packs the book with sufficient technical-financial jargon and concepts to make this a bit of a difficult read. His main contribution is to paint Wall Street people and institutions as overly eager to invent new, highly leveraged investment strategies which allowed them to reap large, up-front profits and to pass on the risk to somebody else.
But the Wall Street earthquake is only the secondary reason for the global financial debacle. The primary reason was federal housing policy, exposed as risky ideology years ago by many critics including Harvard professor and Manhattan Institute scholar Howard Husock ("America's Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake," 2003). The leveraged mortgage instruments and the institutions behind them became worthless because an inconceivable number of mortgages were predestined to go bad. The subprime home buyers couldn't continue to pay because they were underqualified to get the loans -- often at 100% financing -- in the first place. A decades-long series of flawed federal policies and activism by leftist community organizers such as corrupt ACORN essentially coerced banks into lending to shaky borrowers, who not infrequently provided inadequate or outright fraudulent financial statements.
Husock saw it all coming before the year 2000, when he wrote in "City Journal," the Manhattan Institute's online journal: "The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act...into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities--and...a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks." Read Husock's article at city-journal dot org if you wish to really get to the bottom of the disaster and learn who the perpetrators are.
Morris mentions this fundamental aspect only briefly, with very little detail and more than a hint of contempt. If he has his head in the sand regarding the essence of the crisis, what should I think of his book?
Welcome to deregulated corporate America! The dream or the nightmare?
Terrific work going back and explaining the subprime mortgage crisis. Though I will warn you, this isn't one of those for the Average Joe. You already need to have a base knowledge about the mortgage industry, the driving factors behind the crisis to get a good feel for this book. The Author goes back to the 1970's to understand the mortgage crisis that happened in 2007-2008. He makes references to the fact that between the recent write downs and defaults of residential mortgages, corporate debt, credit card debt, and bonds the total debt will be about $1 trillion however given the fact that this book was written before the Lehman and Bear fiascos the grand total should be well above those figures!! Also he doesn't give us an idea as to how this is going to end but concludes it by saying some kind of regulation will be in place. However the book deserves no less than 4 stars for the way it was written. Very well and professionally done.
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
I must caution anyone who wants to read this book; this book will piss you off! The author provides the background of the financial landscape from the Presidency of John F. Kennedy forwards. He throws in the various financial scams and scandals that presaged our current mess and shows their connection to what came ahead. He describes in some detail the financial "products" developed by the wave of mathemeticians who stormed the financial palace gates and which created our current financial mess. I must say the author moves a bit quickly through the various acronyms such as CDO's, collaterallized debt obligations and the like leaving me a bit confused as to how these people could sell "products" that existed almost independently from the underlying assets such that if the value of the actual asset fell slightly, the "product" became virtually worthless.
I came away feeling that anyone who invests in the stock market or bond market independently is a fool. Only a very safe, non-risky mutual fund would seem to protect the average investor from the ineptitude and arrogance of the Wall Street insiders. Anything marked higher risk would seem to me to be a euphemism for what the author calls "Toxic waste", the assets the large brokerage firms don't want to carry and delight in passing off to schmucks like me.
So Caveat emptor!
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