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Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, And Corruption Led To Economic Armageddon (2011)

by Gretchen Morgenson(Favorite Author)

3.93 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0805091203 (ISBN13: 9780805091205)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Times Books

review 1: What an incredibly important but depressing book. It viscerally skewers so much of the trope that passes for thinking about economics today. Sure, bankers are bad, but their enablers in Congress, Fannie and Freddie were the ultimate force multiplier. Will we experience a similar crash again, the book asks at the end? Most certainly. The 1600 pages of dreck called "Dodd-Frank" was sponsored by two of the leading criminally ignorant miscreants at the core of this entire disaster. There were many others: Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke and more. The lesson should be widespread distrust in DC and the deepest possible skepticism when DC aligns with Wall Street to 'help America'.
review 2: I laud Morgenson and Rosner for their exposé of the... more mortgage crisis. But I take issue with the title of the book -- Reckless Endangerment, How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. The book deals with housing finance as its core theme and no where on the cover does the book allude to this? Perhaps the authors viewed mortgage finance as too esoteric a theme to warrant a book. The book focused in particular on Fannie Mae and its nefarious and cunning CEO Jim Johnson. While I deplore Fannie Mae's aggressive lobbying techniques, financial accounting dishonesty, and manipulation of the American Dream as a means to its own profit-oriented goals to secure public funding and benign regulation, I also take issue with 2 of the 3 causes in the book's tag-line: outsized ambition and greed. Outsized ambition and greed have defined human nature for ages. All firms look out for their own best interests as all people look after their own best interest. Let's not implicate Wall Street firms, originators, or the ratings agencies for those faults. Instead, implicate those who have transgressed the law, misrepresented facts, or otherwise obfuscated reality -- in this case, I lay the blame on mortgage originators with their liar loans, investment banks who complied with the illicit origination and profited off selling the loans, ratings agencies who padded ratings to secure business, and Government Sponsored Entities for masking the risks of home ownership for borrowers. All of this behavior crossed ethical lines. I remain appalled at how little those involved faced punishment. Given the incentive structure of these firms, expect future instances of corruption and ethical lapses to recur with financial crises repeating themselves. less

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