Roger Lowenstein's "The End of Wall Street"

This book is too much story and not enough theory & fact for my taste. If you like your history as a drama with key characters meeting and the author giving a blow-by-blow description of events and "atmosphere". This is the book for you. But I prefer something that provides more data and graphs, something with more discussion of economic theory. I preferred Charles R. Morris' The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash.

If you want a panoramic view of the crash and an introduction to all the players. This book is for you. It thankfully has a 9 page list of all the "key" players. This gives you a sense of how much detail about individuals is in this book.

The book does an fairly good job of apportioning blame. For example:

The grim recession handed the Democrats as golden opportunity to retake the White House -- and also, so the faithful hoped, roll back the credo of laissey-faire. On the campaign trail, Obama stirred hopes of a second FDR, or at least a second New Deal. He artfully blamed the financial crisis on eight years of extreme Republicanism. The truth was muddier. Given how boldly the administration had intervened to save the banks, Bush was no Herbert Hoover. Nor were the Democrats free of blame for the crisis's origins. While Bush-style conservatives had loudly champoined deregulation, Democrats such as Robert Rubin had deregulated in practice. The Democrats had done the most to insultae the mortgage twins, Fannie and Freddie, from demands that they reform and trim their balance sheets. On the other hand, blame for the ineffeictive or tardy response to the crisis rested with the Bush administration and with the GOP naysayers in the House. Obama hung his candidacy on the slogan of "Change," and by November 4, change was what the electorate wanted.

After the election, Obama's financial policy was more moderate than many expected; indeed, it was largely a continuation of the Paulson-Bernanke-Geithner regime. The president-elect ensured a smooth transition by elevating Geithner from the New Your Fed to Treasury secretary. This was a clear signal that any "change" would be incremental.

We all know that "change" was delivered in small doses by Obama who spent the first year and a half of his presidency in trying to find "common ground" with the rabid Republicans whose only goal was to sabotage his presidency. We know that Obama ended up siding with the banks and has done very little to help the average Americans. He got a $700 billion "stimulus" plan through Congress but a big chunk of it was tax reductions and not real stimulus. He has continued the policies of giveaways of taxpayer dollars to the Wall Steet banks to prop them up while only making gestures toward the distress of Main Street and the millions of foreclosed homeowners. His heart may be in the right place, but ideologically he has sold himself to his Wall Street patrons. As a consequence, this Great Recession will last for many, many years.

For those who want to understand the mess, this book is a good starting place. It will help you understand how the "laissez-faire" ideology of the last 30 years created this crash. It helps you appreciate how Greenspan set up the economy for a series of bubbles and crashes. And it gives you insight into why so little is being done to "reform" the financial system.