In many ways this was the most painful book of the many I’ve read about the financial crisis, because it focused lower down on the chain: the subprime mortgages packaged in securitizations, telling the stories of the people who sold them (twenty-four-year-olds making $150,000 a year and blowing it on drugs and cars, using the money as an excuse not to look any further into what they were doing, or experienced salesmen who let the money seduce them too, unless they got so sick of themselves that they had to quick) and the people who signed up (often under incredible sales pressure, and even that wasn’t enough—there was plenty of outright fraud in what they were told and in forgery of their signatures on false documents), as well as the people who made the long-term, big money and walked away with almost all of it (in one case, also with an ambassadorship) and the regulators who tried to fight this system but lost again and again because the lenders were more politically powerful and willing to donate huge sums to keep it that way (and we all know that government regulation is a bad idea).

It’s an enraging story and it’s not fixed, though I’m experiencing at least some schadenfreude with the recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling pointing out that the entities foreclosing on a lot of these loans have no proof that they own them, because these experienced and sophisticated businesses who insist that unsophisticated homeowners are responsible for every piece of paper those homeowners (allegedly) signed—wait for it—didn’t keep actual records, or transfer them as the securitizers promised to do in the contracts they signed with the banks and investors. Ooops. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer industry. ( )

Loved it! White collar crime in little old Orange County? OMG! Tell me it isn't so! It's books like this that should help us rethink our glorification of wealth accumulation and face what really happens to a people who are consumed by making money. The millionaire you know may be a monster. Thank you to Michael Hudson and others like him who use their talents to expose the truth instead of sitting silently, as most do. ( )