Customer Reviews

The Rise and Fall of the US Mortgage and Credit Markets: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Market Meltdown

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This book is slimmer and less dense than it looks. It is full of graphs and tables, which allows the reader to turn pages quickly, and its language is clear, integrating story and numbers without tiring. But you have to like numbers and be ready to digest its 200 graphs and 100 tables in order to get the most of out it.

"The Rise and Fall of the US Mortgage and Credit Markets" starts from the beginning and covers every aspect of the crisis: who owns houses, how are homes financed, by who and for whom, and what is the role played by cheap credit and rising home prices. The book then delves into what went wrong with loan origination, securitization, leverage, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, home ownership incentives, regulation, and greed. Its sections on "when will the crisis end" and on the measures to deal with it were bound to be dated soon after publication (May 2009), but they provide a great snapshot of developments and thinking to that point. In its final pages one also gets a sense of the general direction of reform and the tradeoffs that will inform it.

This book can serve as an introduction to the subject (it covers the basics and is very readable), but my sense is that it has too much information for that purpose, and thus will get more mileage from someone who knows the story but wants to dig deeper into data and long-term trends. One thing is clear - this will be my reference for other books that I read, coming back to it so I can reread and process again the data that provide the context for other stories out there.