The Great Read-cession, Part IX

We’re wrapping up the financial crisis book reviews with today’s look at two books on the reform efforts that followed the crash of 2008.

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

by Ron Suskind, 2011

 

The last two books I read focused mainly on the government’s response to the crisis, as opposed to the crisis itself. Confidence Men, which got a lot of attention when it came out for its revelations of in-fighting in the Obama Administration, showcases Obama’s response to the financial crisis, both as a candidate and as a new president.

As a candidate, of course, the financial crisis and the housing bubble were a boon to Obama. The sluggish economy of President Bush’s last few years helped Obama’s message of change resonate with the electorate, and John McCain’s incoherent response to the crisis—including his assertion that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” on the day Lehman failed—helped doom his campaign.

But once Obama was elected, the crisis became a tremendous albatross. One problem was that while many within the campaign anticipated a crisis of some kind, nobody really expected it to come so fast and be so severe. Suskind details a scene from early in Obama’s campaign—August of 2007—in which Obama’s economic advisers warn him that, as president, he will need to respond to a housing crisis. But they estimated that the crisis would hit in “year two” of an Obama presidency, and it would cost about two million jobs. In reality, of course, it came before Election Day, and ultimately cost about eight million jobs.