Customer Reviews

The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Robert Shiller's track record was impressive at first. He wrote Market volatility in 1992 outlining how stock price volatility was due to psychological speculation as it was disconnected from economic fundamentals. He was right as the stock gyrations in 1987 and 1989 demonstrated. In 2000, he wrote the excellent Irrational Exuberance stating stock prices bubbled up and were bound for a crash. Within three months the NASDAQ did exactly that loosing more than half its value taking the rest of the market on a three year brutal downturn (dot.com Bubble). At this stage, we thought Shiller was blessed with superior insight. Then, he lost his edge by envisioning retail financial insurance products to protect against risks often not worth covering as introduced in his strange The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century. This book recycles many of those confused concepts.

In "The Subprime Solution" Shiller diagnoses the cause of the Subprime crisis and also develops a set of short-term and long-term solutions to fix and prevent this crisis.

His diagnosis is OK. He attributes the overarching cause of the Subprime crisis to bubble psychology. This diagnosis is a repeat of "Irrational Exuberance" focused on residential real estate instead of stock markets. He ties a lot of symptoms such as the increasingly lenient underwriting, lenient Moody's MBS ratings, and investors appetite for MBS to bubble psychology. He thinks bankers, MBS investors, Moody's, hedge funds, homeowners, and condo flippers all thought they could throw caution to the wind since the value of the underlying collateral (home) would shore up all boats.

When Shiller comes up with recommendations he is not convincing. In the short-term he simply suggests we bail out everybody by reviving the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) first established in 1933 but no longer in existence. The former HOLC accepted mortgages as collateral for loans to mortgage lenders so long as the mortgages had more lenient terms than the market. This recommendation has several flaws to it. First, it runs into moral hazard. It would bail out with taxpayer's money homeowners who never had the financial resources to buy a house and condo flippers who speculated with other people's money. Second, a good deal of those mortgages has been securitized into complex collaterized bond structures with many tranches sold to international investors. Those mortgages administered by bond trusts are not pledgeable to an HOLC organization.

Shiller's long term recommendations are ineffective. Here he repeats many of the retail insurance products he envisioned in "The New Financial Order." His first recommendation is nationwide government subsidized retail financial advice. Yet, all the financial advice prospective homeowners need is to ask themselves if they can afford the mortgage. If the borrower is not numerate, the creditor should operate in a regulatory environment to be forced to make a prudent decision on his behalf. Shiller recommends the adoption of a new economic currency that would be adjusted for inflation. He feels this would improve price information of homes. In a country with very moderate historical inflation such an economic unit adds much confusion without merit. Shiller also thinks that his creation (with the Chicago Board of Trade) of home price index futures will eliminate bubbles because international investors will short (sell futures) on cities whose home prices appear to have bubbled. But, such futures markets have not eliminated bubbles in stock and commodity prices. Why would they eliminate bubbles in residential real estate? Additionally, those home price index future markets have been in existence for already two years. And, they don't seem to get off the ground. Trading volume is not sufficient to provide valuable price information. Other strange recommendations include his "continuous-workout mortgage" whose term would be adjusted downward to reflect the current income of the specific occupation of the borrower. This entails a huge transfer of risk to the creditors which would result in much higher mortgage rates. Another recommendation is home equity insurance for the borrower. But, it is not the borrower that bears the risk on the collateral value, it is the creditor. This insurance would be of little value to the borrower. Another recommendation is livelihood insurance insuring one's income from the risk of one's specific occupation. This product is not readily feasible. It also understates how transferable many professional skills are and how liquid are labor markets are. In summary, his long term recommendations do not address the Subprime crisis.

I recommend a far better book on the subject: Charles R. Morris The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. Also, Shiller feels cities are commodities with urban amenities easily replicable. For an excellent book that explains why this is not so, I recommend Richard Florida's Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

In terms of the value, this book would rate three stars for the layman but only 1 for those knowledgeable in the field.

During the first approximately 100 pages of this 180 page book, Schiller describes what lead to this debacle and draws analogies between the current situation and past in both the U.S. (i.e., events leading to the Depression, the Savings and Loan crisis leading to the formation of the Resolution Trust Company, etc.) and overseas (i.e., the 1990s bubble bursting in Japan and the Swedish banking sector crises of the 20 years ago). What he describes should be well known by anyone who has had an undergraduate course in U.S. Economic history, reads a sophisticated financial newspaper or magazine (i.e., Financial Times or Economist) and/or is a financial professional. Hence for this group the first 100 pages would have very little value. For layman without this background, however, this knowledge would provide good perspective.

Where the book really is weak, though, is the remaining 80 pages where Schiller provides his "solution(s)". This is what he calls the "democratization" of the financial market. The important points of this consist of:

a) The provision of financial advice to "the masses" through subsidized professional financial advice.

b) Adding more "bite" to government regulatory bodies (i.e., SEC).

c) the creation and utilization of financial instruments that provide insurance against fluctuations in home prices, economic conditions and peraonal economic conditions (i.e., unemployment). Examples of such financial instruments provided by Schiller include options and futures indexed to housing prices, Government debt instruments that are counter cyclical and instruments that provide the ability to hedge against personal financial circumstances.

Each of the above need to be examined in detail. With respect to the first, it seems highly unlikely that high quality professional financial advisement services that are unbiased (i.e., don't provide advise geared to selling financial products that do not necessarily coorespond to individuals' econommic situations as opposed to the commissions of the financial advisors) can be provided at a cost effective price that even the lower income ranks can afford. Any such labor intensive service can only be provided (in general), cost effectively, by those with limited educations and/or poorly trained backgrounds. A good analogy would be going to H&R Block. You pay relatively little there but you end up with high school graduates who, in general, have very limited qualifications. The end result would be mediocre advise. In a recent article in the New York Times the IRS was quoted as stating that 2/3 of tax forms prepared by tax preperation firms had contained errors. If these firms cannot succeed in providing relatively simple tax assistance how can they provide more complicated financial advise on how to hedge home, retirement and other assets? Even if they were all highly qualified this would still be a problem. The events leading to the current bubble bursting, as well as those of the late 1990s, caught many highly educated professionals such as Alan Greenspan and Bernanke by surprise. If they failed how can the less qualified be expected to perform better? This simply does not seem logical.

With respect to Schiller's recommendation to beef up government regulatory agencies such as the SEC, this would seem the most feasible of all. SEC funding can be increased, penalties increased, and litigation can be loosened to permit an increased deterance of corporate mafleasance by accounting, investment banks and other financial institutions. This recommendation is very realistic.

Schiller's third recommendation, the utilization of financial instruments to mitigate against fluctuations in housing prices and individual economic circumstances, sounds very nice theoretically but is hard to achieve in reality. With respect to housing price fluctuations, options futures on housing prices can be used (they already exist) but they require extensive knowledge in finance and they are relatively expensive to purchase when housing prices are on the decline (when they are needed most). Hence not a solution that seems very practical beyond homebuidling conglomerates. But even they did not make very extensive use of them.

With respect to financial instruments that can be used to mitigate against individuals' economic fluctuations (i.e., unemployment) there are other problems. First they do not exist. Secondly, even if they did (and why they are not provided by the private sector to begin with), there would be to much of a problem relating to moral hazard. Individuals can purchase such insurance then either intentionally put themselves out of work or not do enough to prevent unemployment. If one has insurance against all (or nearly all) income losses stemming from unemployment the incentive would greatly decrease to take steps to prevent unemployment.

In short, only Schiller's recomendation to beef up regulatory agencies seem realistic and feasible (at least in the foreseable future).

Robert Shiller, the prescient author of the book Irrational Exuberance, offers an insightful examination of the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis, and suggests a list of potential measures for the future. He lays the blame for the subprime crisis on the same oblivious fiscal attitudes that led to the technology bubble of the 1990s and the real estate bubble of the 2000s. Both bubbles involved excessive lending and resulted in severe losses for capital providers. His prescription for dealing with the crisis involves a range of policy measures. In the short term, he calls for bailouts for low-income borrowers who got drawn into subprime scams that they did not understand. For the long term, he proposes a new framework for financial institutions, more transparent information, simpler contracts, improved risk-management markets, equity insurance and home loans linked to income, among other measures. Both his diagnosis and his prescription will be controversial, no doubt, but getAbstract thinks his book is a necessary text for anyone who wants to understand what's happened, and how to survive it and learn from it.

Everyone nowadays seems to agree on the root cause of the current economic crisis; it is the bursting of the real estate bubble. But what caused this bubble? What hazard does its bursting pose to the solvency of financial institutions? What steps can be taken to heal the economy and prevent similar calamities in the future?

In The Subprime Solution, Robert J. Shiller proposes answers to these questions. The answers that he offers represent a furthering of earlier research that he has done on the subject of bubbles that have occurred in other markets besides real estate. In the first edition of his earlier work, Irrational Exuberance (2000), Shiller correctly predicted the bursting of the bubble in technology stocks. According to Shiller, both the technology bubble and the housing bubble are due to the same basic cause, namely widespread and misplaced confidence among the investing public. As such, they can be characterized as speculative bubbles, the "speculative" modifier being the key point that distinguishes Shiller's analysis from other competing theories.

Shiller explains that speculative bubbles are psychological in origin. When a home buying frenzy ensues in a given locale, home prices rise due to increased demand. The price increases support the widespread belief that declines in real estate value will not occur, in turn feeding the buying frenzy. In effect, the phenomenon is a vicious circle, which feeds upon itself. Eventually, the prices of homes become inflated far beyond what is explicable in terms of building costs, land availability, and other economic fundamentals. It is under such conditions that the market is ripe for a downturn.

The misplaced confidence in the real estate market not only affected individuals, but it affected lending institutions as well, and here lies the key to the current crisis. For years, there has been a culture among lenders of rubber-stamping home loan applications, and a failure take the obvious steps of verifying the borrower's income and credit history. These practices resulted from a misplaced confidence in the quality of the home as an instrument of collateral, and accordingly the expectation that cases of default would not cause a significant loss to the lender. Lenders have relied on economic models that failed to take into account the devastating effects of a sharp downturn in home prices, on the assumption that such downturns would never occur.

What can be done to heal our economy, and to prevent similar calamities in the future? The first and obvious answer is better education for both individuals and institutions as to investment risks. Another, more controversial answer is bailouts, and Shiller supports their use. Shiller is quick to admit that bailouts are unfair, in that they penalize those who behave responsibly and forgive the misdeeds of the reckless. Interest rate cuts designed to ward off foreclosure for those with variable rate mortgages are one type of bailout. These represent a hidden transfer of wealth from the conservative money-market investor to the over-leveraged home buyer, and as such are unfair. But, according to Shiller, the rate cut is a necessary evil to prevent a devastating loss of confidence in our financial institutions.

We have all been led to believe that a house is a solid investment, and prominent writers on personal finance for the lay public have historically stressed this point. But for most individuals and families, home buying violates all the standard principles of investment science; it is a single, high-value undiversified asset with no available means to hedge changes in price. In light of these considerations, is there anything that can be done to make the risks for home buyers more reasonable? According to Shiller, there is, and this takes us to the most exciting and innovative part of of his work. In the chapter entitled the Promise of Financial Democracy, Shiller proposes the creation of new financial instruments that could lend sanity to the real estate markets. A detailed understanding of such instruments demands more knowledge of the field of finance than is at the disposal of most readers, so some explanation is in order.

If you ask a homeowner in New York what he thinks about the stability of his real estate investment, he is likely to tell you that it is solid. He lives in the place, and to own it he has had no choice but to leverage himself and accept great risk. It is difficult for a person in such a situation to make a disinterested assessment of risk. He is affected by the psychology of his neighbors, who are similarly leveraged. Ask the New Yorker if he would own a house in Los Angeles, where he has no personal stake, and he is likely to say, "No way. Too many earthquakes and fires." It would be desirable for the New Yorker to be able to register his unfavorable opinions about Los Angeles and take short positions in the LA housing market. Such would exert downward pressure on house prices in Los Angeles, and subject their prices to a more democratic bidding process. The introduction and widespread trading of new types of real estate derivatives, which would allow investors to take both long and short positions, can be expected to do a positive social good; they would lead to better price discovery in the real estate markets, and could ward off the formation of speculative bubbles.

In practice, most homeowners would not want to take any kind of speculative position, either long or short, on the housing market in other cities. However, Shiller argues that such speculative instruments could be repackaged as retail financial products that would allow the homeowner to hedge risks due to unpredictable fluctuations in price. Under such circumstances, the homeowner's confidence in his investment would be rational and not subject to the psychological contagion of "new era" hype. Towards the end of the book, Shiller argues that being able to secure the price of one's home against spastic variations could prevent the panic selling and "white flight" that has occurred in urban areas.

All these innovative, forward-looking ideas make The Subprime Solution an exciting work. It should be on the reading list of anyone who wishes to get a better understanding of the current crisis.

Karl Marx, who burned many a late-night candle in the study of historical dynamics, once said "'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear twice. He forgot to add: The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." That may have been true a couple of centuries ago, but a more current assessment might be "No matter how much you have learned from history, and however well you have corrected your historical faults, there are plenty more new, and equally treacherous, mistakes to be made in the future." The current financial crisis seems to bear this out.

Keynesian aggregate demand management appeared to have died in the stagflation of the 1980's, not because its "rational expectations" critics had a better theory (I think rational expectations theory is just a sick joke), but because of the basic correctness of Milton Friedman's insight that legislative counter-cyclical policy is just too slow to deal with the business cycle. Now, it appears we are all Keynesians (indeed, Republicans have been especially Keynesian in the years since Reagan's historic climb to power), and government is moving at virtually lightning speed to prevent the normal operation of the business cycle. Richard Nixon was wrong when he said, "We are all Keynesians now," but now, almost forty years later, it appears to be true. Who would ever have expected this turn of events?

Where are the infamous "rational expectations" theorists now? Doubtless they are holed up somewhere with the Nobel prizes and endowed chairs, laughing all the way to the bank.

I think we can confidently say is that if people learn from history, it is only the past ten years or so of history. I was personally blown away when I read Alan Greenspan, who had presided over the Federal Reserve for some nineteen years, admitted to Congress last October that "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity -- myself especially---are in a state of shocked disbelief." I hope Greenspan is simply lying, but I have a deep fear that he is telling the truth.

Some people did foresee the subprime mortgage crisis and predicted an ensuing financial meltdown, among them Edward Gramlich (Subprime Mortgages: America's Latest Boom and Bust, Urban Institute Press, 2007) and Robert Shiller, who coined the phrase "irrational exuberance"---adopted by Greenspan to dampen a recent stock market run-up. This book is a bit of "I told you so," as Shiller makes it clear at every turn that he predicted this a long time ago, so he must be listened to now in attempting to find a solution. The logic isn't there, but Shiller's suggestions are useful and interesting.

Shiller believes the subprime crisis is a case of a financial panic, or "bubble," of a sort that has recurred periodically since the dawn to international financial markets (Charles Kindleberger, "Manias, Panics and Crashes," 2000). In the current case, housing prices began a steady increase in about 1999, and by 2004 or so, supposedly intelligent people began to think that housing prices had an inexorable tendency to increase at what we would not consider to be a virtually astronomical rate.

Therefore, lending institutions dropped their lending requirements for new mortgages, on the grounds that in a couple of years or so increasing property values would ensure the integrity of the financial asset whether or not the current mortgagee was delinquent. From this point on, in a world-wide financial sector most of whose members, like Greenspan, could not conceive of basic market failures, the melt-down was quite inevitable.

There are many things I do not understand about the current crisis, the most critical being why so few financial analysts sounded the warning, and why it was not heeded by level-headed guys in policy positions. I certainly saw it coming, and sold two primary residences in 2006 (on behalf of family members whose finances I managed) at the top of the market. I would have sold them two years earlier if I could have convinced their owners of the madness of holding on to these bubble assets.

Shiller's recommendations are well-meaning and worthy of support. His concept of "democratization of finance," so that financial institutions work for all of us, not just the very rich, is brilliant and fecund. If Shiller had his way, people would be as knowledgeable in financial affairs as they are in politics, health care, and other areas in which informed voters and consumers can really make a difference. Each and every one of Shiller's suggestions is worthy of support. First, he says, the financial information infrastructure should be extended to all citizens, much as health care information is (at least ideally) today. Second, financial instruments should be created to deal with the major risk factors faced by the non-wealthy (e.g., variations in house value, price and wage levels). Third, there should be a "default" set of basic financial contracts that non-knowledgeable consumers can use to deal with their most important investments, including home ownership and retirement.

In fact, we still do not really understand the causes of the current financial crisis, and we may not for many years. Economists are still debating the causes of the Great Depression, some seventy-five years later (although there is more agreement now than in previous decades). Certainly, more regulation of financial innovation is needed, but in fact, whatever SEC regulations are created, in the next great upsurge of economic activity there will be more financial innovation that slips under the regulatory radar, smart people will make a lot of money and get out while the getting is good, and industry leaders will act as though the new bubble will last forever, or at least for another year (every year). Some new Greenspan-clone will be frankly "shocked" that markets don't work perfectly, and history will repeat itself, not in Hegel's or Marx's sense, but in a perennial tragicomedy that characterizes financial dynamics.

Shiller is very supportive of "behavioral finance" in this book, recognizing that people do not have completely objective theories of how financial markets operate, or even of probability theory basics. He is wrong, however, if he thinks that a strong "financial information infrastructure" will change this. People with crazy theories of probability and risk cannot be taught otherwise---I know because I have tried. I have tried to tell day-traders that they are enriching only their brokers, and they will be out of business in nine months (the median life of a day trader, I am told). I have tried to convince testosterone-endowed relatives that, whatever happens in James Bond movies, luck is not with the sly, the muscular, or the devout. All to no avail.

Some will say that we should suppress the whole dynamic that gives rise to financial innovation and bubbles. We should always lend a critical and attentive ear to such proposals, but we must always recognize that the vitality of our economic system depends on financial innovation, and we should always appreciate those people who ignore history and stick their necks out to make new history. They go where angels (and "progressive" political critics) fear to tread, and we are the better for it.

For those reading this book hoping to find the root cause of this crisis I suspect they came away lacking. Reading this book was like eating cotton candy. A whole lot of chewing but not much substance. High level fluff without detail. Let me help you out. This phase of the mortgage crisis is due to subprime mortgages. 75% of subprime borrowers took out adjustable rate mortgages. The most popular of which was the 2/28 ARM. The first two years of this mortgage offered a low teaser rate. When the teaser rate expired the monthly mortgages payment went up on average 30%. Now here is the unbelievable part. All of these subprime lenders qualified people for the loan solely based on their ability to make the initial low teaser rate payment without worrying about whether they could make the payment once the mortgage reset. Which is why we have this massive default rate. Now the lenders knew this was going to happen. They were counting on refinancing the loan every two years when the mortgage reset. To help grab the borrowers equity they added a 3% prepayment penalty. They were going to milk them for fees every 2 years like a milk cow. This works as long as the house prices are going up. It doesn't work when house prices go down because no one is going to give you a loan for more than the house is worth. Now did you get any of this detail out of the book?

This book is one of the best crisis books focuses almost entirely on the housing market. The "solutions" given are both genius and revolutionary. The Subprime Solution should be the ultimate strategy guide to how we can reform the housing markets.

Professor Shiller is a leading figure in behavioural finance and this boook will certainly maintain that prominent position. The book argues that free markets are both the cause and the potential solution to our current woes. In reading the latter part of the book I was constantly reminded of Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" with its warning that markets are more than just a great allocative mechanism, but also a engine to disperse political power from a narrow political elite. Many of Shiller's ideas for hedging house price risk have already been taken up (admittedly in a small way) via the Case-Shiller house price index. I think this book, especially in its latter part, can serve as a blue-print for a wider dissemination of "financial democracy" via disability insurance, etc. I have heard it said that the financial crisis has brought out the best of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister. It has certainly produced some of Professor Shiller's finest writing. Let us hope Brown and Shiller do not have cause for further improvement in the near future.
William Forbes (Loughborough Business School, England)

For Prof. R.J. Shiller, the root of the subprime mortgage crisis in the US is a myth, the belief that real estate prices must strongly trend upward for demographic reasons.
He proves that the price of real estate, to the contrary, is trending lower. What went up are the quality and the dimension of the average individual houses. But what about `land'? Didn't Mark Twain recommend strongly: `Go for land. They've stopped producing it.'? R.J. Shiller remarks cleverly that only 2,6 % of US land is used for urbanization.
Another factor of the bubble was psychological: the human herd instinct. There was a social contagion of boom thinking.
A third, more specific, factor was the deliberate governmental policy to promote home-ownership as much as possible. This should be good for the Party.

When the real estate bubble burst, it disrupted immediately the credit markets. Aggressive mortgage lenders never worried about repayment risks. They repackaged the mortgages, got top ratings from the rating agencies and sold their packages to third parties all over the world.
But even more importantly, the crisis damaged the `social fabric', the way of life of millions of families and also human relationships (through aggressive creditors). It created an atmosphere of distrust, of hoarding, with runs on banks; in one word, it gave rise to a psychological environment that could lead to a severe and long depression, which would hurt all citizens. Therefore, the subprime crisis must be solved.

Prof. R.J. Shiller makes a distinction between the short term and the long term solution.
In the short term, there should be a massive bail-out in order to prevent an escalation of the crisis and of the economic downturn.
In the long term, the US government should create a basic social contract and protect every citizen against major misfortune. It should impose financial democracy through standardized full disclosure documents so that everybody should get better information about all the risks involved. Without affecting individual privacy, indicators should be created about the real value of real estate. Those should lead to a more efficient pricing of houses and to a stabilization of the market. Prof. R.J. Shiller did not only recommend these policies, but created an indicator himself.

With an open and clear-sighted mind, Prof. Shiller wrote a small, but essential, book about a dramatic worldwide crisis, without losing the `human touch'. It is an essential read for all those interested in the future of mankind.

I am an admitted follower of the work of economist Dr. Robert J. Shiller.

His partial bio reads like this (From Yale University): "Robert J. Shiller is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, and Professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1967 and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. He has written on financial markets, financial innovation, behavioral economics, macroeconomics, real estate, statistical methods, and on public attitudes, opinions, and moral judgments regarding markets"

Shiller, Robert J. The Subprime Solution - How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do About It, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey Copyright © 2008 by Robert J. Shiller

I finally got around to reading Subprime Solutions - How Today's Financial Crisis Happened and What to do about it. (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey USA Copyright (c) 2008 by Robert J. Shiller


Admittedly, Shiller's other recent books entitled Irrational Exuberance (2005) and Animal Spirits (with George Akerlof - 2009) are terribly tough acts to be compared against. My review of Animal Spirits is here. I am devouring Irrational Exuberance at the moment.

I enjoyed this book yet, found many of the proposed solutions (continual workout mortgage, equity insurance for homeowners etc.) lacking in their application to the new dimensions of the U.S. homeowner crisis that now exist, in 2010.

Yet, Shiller always has insights that I find appetizing. I always learn from his work. Clearly he remains both a central and highly regarded advocate for the "unfinished business" that U.S. policy makers must embrace to thwart the ongoing loss of home ownership by the American middle-class and establish safeguards to this will not happen again.

Here are some excerpts from Subprime solutions that I really appreciated. I'll let Shiller's words speak for themselves:

"More importantly, this crisis has set in motion fundamental societal changes-changes that affect our consumer habits, our values, our relatedness to each other. From now on we will all be conducting our lives and doing business with each other a little bit differently." P.1.

"Allowing these destructive changes to proceed un impeded could cause damage not only to the economy but to the social fabric - the trust and optimism people feel for each other and for their shared institutions and ways of life - for decades to come." P.2

"Today the typical household has as its principal investment its home. A home represents a highly leveraged exposure to a single, stationary plot of real estate-about the riskiest asset one can imagine. The standard mortgage provides no protection against difficulties in repaying the lender due to changes in the marketplace. But mortgages can and should be designed to compensate for these changes by including provisions to ensure homeowners against their major risk." P. 22.

"strengthen the social fabric, and create the conditions for greater economic stability and growth." P. 22

"Real home prices for the United States as a whole increased 85% between 1997 and the peak in 2006." p 32

"The most important single element to be reckoned with in understanding this or any other speculative boom is the social contagion of boom thinking, mediated by the common observation of rapidly rising prices. This social contagion lends increasing credibility to stories - I call them "new era" stories-that appear to justify the belief that the boom will continue." P. 41.

"He (Greenspan) does not seem to respect research approaches from the fields of psychology or sociology." P.43

"What seems to be absent from the thinking of many economists and economic commentators is an understanding that contagion of ideas is consistently a factor in human affairs." P.43

"The losers are disproportionately those people who have prudently been staying out of the housing market bubble." Pp.92-93.

Religion and response to the Depression - "Even religious thinking returned to more traditional forms. The public amusement at religious foibles so evident at the time of the 1925 Scopes trial, when the Bible was put on trial versus the theory of evolution, was fading, and being replaced by a desire to find in religion some comforting interpretation of life." pp. 96-97

"We must always be concerned about public perceptions of fairness and evenhanded treatment, about public confidence that our economic system is moving forward to provide opportunities for all. That confidence is being seriously eroded in today's subprime crisis." P.100.

"The loss of trust and belief in the economic system can have consequences not only for the economy itself, but for the social fabric as a whole, leading us all to suffer needlessly. P. 101

"The balance sheet problems into which people fall if their homes lose value are purely financial losses. But they can be converted into substantial real losses to the economy if they are allowed to destroy public confidence." P.105 -

"There is an inherent unfairness in our economy, evidenced by its sharp income inequalities." P.106

"We have to be willing to spend money on securing economic justice. That means allocating resources to determining-to the extent that this is possible-who among mortgage borrowers were misled and mistreated, and then focusing the bailouts on them." P. 112

"In a similar vein, the human sciences- psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neurobiology-are increasing our understanding of the mind by leaps and bounds, and this knowledge is now being applied to finance and economics. We have a much better grasp of how and why people make economic errors, and of how we can restructure institutions to help avoid these errors. Pp. 118-119

"Denying the importance of psychology and other social sciences for financial theory would be analogous to physicists denying the importance of friction in the application of Newtonian mechanics." P. 119

"A new kind of home mortgage that I call a continuous-workout mortgage would have terms that are adjusted continuously (in practice probably monthly) in response to evidence about changing ability to pay and changing conditions in the housing market." P. 157

"Decreases in home values can reduce or even eliminate a homeowner's equity, making it difficult or impossible for the owner to refinance with a new mortgage. The homeowner may conclude that it is impossible to move to another home, even if such a move would allow her to take advantage of a lucrative job offer. The mortgage .I' may eventually end in default, especially since the homeowner may decide that it is just not worth struggling to make further payments on a mortgage when she can just walk away from the whole mess." P. 161

"Louis Uchitelle, in his 2007 book The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, discovered that those on whom this misfortune falls are truly suffering -but suffering mostly in silence, out of a sense of shame and of being at fault." P. 164

"Risk-avoidance behavior also has an impact on the behavior of city, regional, and even national governments. Fearing the uncertainties associated with new economic development initiatives, these governments typically choose to play it safe and model themselves along conventional lines. They slavishly imitate other successful entities when they ought to be cultivating their locales as vital centers for specific emerging technologies or industries." P. 168 -

"The key to long - term economic success is rightly placed confidence in markets. In contrast, bubbles are the result of misplaced confidence." P. 171.

A great read written to be consumed by a broad audience. I recommend it.