USA Today: Best Business Books
USA Today is out with its list of best business books for 2009 — Too Big Too Fail and Bailout Nation top the list.
“After the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, then-Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and then-New York Fed president Timothy Geithner stood on the brink of catastrophe. Their decision not to bail out Lehman set off a near panic among investors and lenders worldwide.
In response, the government implemented a $700 billion bailout and has since adopted a series of rescue measures that put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for a potential $14 trillion, author Barry Ritholtz says.
The panic and the U.S. reaction spawned a wave of books. Money Bookshelf editor Gary H. Rawlins picks some of the better ones. The selection includes books that point the finger at Wall Street firms and their CEOs, that blast the government for excessive bailouts, that assail the U.S. economic policy triumvirate for letting the inflation genie out of the bottle, and that explain arcane financial derivatives and how they acted as viral agents spreading the crisis to the global economy.
•Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves by Andrew Sorkin (Viking Adult, $33). Arguably the definitive history of the banking crisis, a blow-by-blow account of how decisions made on Wall Street and in Washington in the past decade led to the crash of the global financial system.
•Bailout Nation: How, Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy by Barry Ritholtz (Wiley, $25). Explores how the U.S. evolved from a rugged independent nation to a soft Bailout Nation, where financial firms are allowed to self-regulate in good times, but are bailed out by taxpayers in bad times.
Way cool !
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Source:
Year’s best business books to make sense of financial crisis
Gary Rawlins
USA TODAY, December 21, 2009
http://www.usatoday.com/money/books/2009-12-20-years-best-business-books_N.htm
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December 23rd, 2009 at 9:22 am
there you go again, pushing your own “book” ;)
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:47 am
Nicely done.
Nothing like free advertising.
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:51 am
Congrats Barry…don’t rest on your laurels. America was indeed a rugged, independent nation. What I see now appalls me. Not only are we in a massive debt cesspool, but our next generation is addicted to time sucking technologies such as facebook and texting. Meanwhile, China and India spend twice as much time studying in school and will work for much cheaper. US corporations have no soul and would fire their mother to save a dime, so they will not be able to resisit sending jobs overseas for better workers at cheaper prices. Good idea for another book.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:01 am
New home sales very lousy…I think the existing home number is goosed by people buying foreclosures and flipping them.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:06 am
Great work Barry! Keep it up.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:06 am
mega congratulations, first off, writing a book is mega hard, and getting kudo’s from the community is even harder……………and let’s not forget it is huge for your own company, the type of client you want is the type that will devour that book
that’s a lifetime achievement, good for you
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 am
wow, new home sales, difference between previous price and new price is 209 too 217, lol, jack up for the credit, like no one saw that coming, lol
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:19 am
2nd edition coming up soon?
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 am
I don’t know if this has been posted already, it is ugly.
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/green_shoots_are_about_to_get.php
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 am
Very cool. Congrats and also great work.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:36 am
Congrats, Barry! We tagged Bailout Nation as “Required reading for every US citizen.” With the USA Today giving you props, we just might get our wish.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:37 am
Congrats, Barry. Steve Barry raises a good question. You going to update Bailout Nation as we learn more about how things went down or write write a new book? Some title ideas:
Yoda is a Little Pussy: Confessions of a Sith Lord
Smile for the Camera: A Secret Life in the Chart Porn Industry
Lawrence Yun: American Hero
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:41 am
beaufou:
Good link. The tsunami will be followed by an even bigger wave. Then again, we’ve known for a while that this is coming.
As for a question asked in the article — does the current bail-out money cover the coming losses in RRE due to resets of Option-ARM loans — I don’t think it does. If I’m wrong, and it does cover these losses, it certainly doesn’t cover CRE, CC debt, etc. (again, as the article points out).
J6PK is being given the “all clear” signal from TPTB (as in, “the recession is over.”). The next leg down will destroy what’s left of the middle class.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:50 am
@beaufou: To be fair, that article/chart was posted in May! A lot has happened since then. Maybe some of these folks have already re-fi’d? Just trying to play devil’s advocate. Our elite masters can’t be wrong all the time, can they? Maybe they’ll get this one right, at least partially by accident or luck.
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:09 am
marcus,
well, obviously just a guess, banks are hording money, my take is that they have wound down derivative exposure, so when it happens certain parties are not bk’d, yet, somehow someway they will need to cover the losses, since they typically take a year before foreclosing and 7 months before they even think about selling, my guess is the banks know they are coming, yet, if jobs are back in style losses will be contained, now, if you have oil back over a hundred and rising rates, they are toastido’s
imho, ben and tim and others know exactly what they are doing and what breaks they need and what they can push to make it happen
in 2011 we could get oh, i don’t know, government guaranteed mortgages on those properties at a discount if you really qualify, they’d say it was the end of the mess and bes thing to move on, yada yada yada
home prices must stay up or states are bankrupt
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:13 am
My book idea about jobs going overseas…”Sellout Nation”
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:18 am
Mannwich
“Maybe some of these folks have already re-fi’d?”
I certainly hope so, otherwise there is a lot of dead men walking out there.
I tried to find an update with no success.
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:27 am
@beaufou: That’s right. I think we need an update on these charts to see what’s really happened since that time. I’m guessing that many probably re-fi’d already and others probably simply walked away. Still others are hunkered down delaying the inevitable.
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:57 am
What a predictable list. I suppose you can’t really expect a MSM journo to do a better job than this.
IMO, Meltown by Tom Woods was the best book that came out this year.
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Another one? Amazing! Those kickbacks are really producing results for you guy. ;)
The only downside to the latest one is that no one reads the newspaper anymore. On the plus side at least the author’s mom will be buying your book. ;)
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Manny:
Some might have walked away, but I don’t think many have refinanced. If I’m not mistaken, the vast majority of homes attached to option-ARM mortgages were/are not worth the original loan amount (this doesn’t even take into consideration the growth of the principal owed during the teaser period). I think these borrowers are hunkered down and waiting.
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
i’ve mentioned this before my sis works for cap one in new mortgage division they bought two years ago, all of there time is spent trying to straigten out screwed up and messed up files, missing papers, pages, etc………..if you’re in distress they are haressing you, if you finally need to do something, they are not prepared, and the beat goes on
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:50 pm
More power to truth, justice and the American way – great job.
December 23rd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
With a photo no less. Congrats Barry!
I plan to download it (legally) to my kindle (OK, actually got it for my wife) after Christmas.
December 23rd, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Congratulations, Barry. Very well deserved.
December 23rd, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Congrats, BR. Writing books people actually read is great praise indeed! Looking forward to picking it up.
My thoughts (by reading the title-description only), is that it seems as if “risk” has been (somewhat) taken out of the equation. And that’s not capitalism. Capitalism requires the destruction of what doesn’t work, not the “bailing out” and perpetuation of what doesn’t work.
But hey, you can’t win elections by saying that.
Merry Christmas to you and yours, BR.
December 24th, 2009 at 7:41 am
If a product is good, it will sooner or later earn the trophies it deserves, just like your work & book. Well done, congrats Barry.