It’s the final post of The Great Read-cession! Just shut up and read!
The End…
What should the government have done differently?
This is a very loaded question. When I first started reading about the issue, while it was going on in 2008-09, I got the sense that this was really a rare case where the government was not at fault. This wasn’t like Watergate or Iraq, where people in power abused that power—it was just a case of private companies going wrong. But it becomes a lot trickier when you look closely at how intermeshed the government and the financial world actually are.
A lot of the conversation about the government’s role in the collapse has surrounded the issue of deregulation, specifically the issue of Glass-Steagall. On the other end of the political spectrum, Republicans have focused on the GSEs as responsible for the decline in lending standards. But both of these issues seem more like scapegoats than real sources of the problem.
As most of the data makes clear, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1992, which directed Fannie and Freddie to purchase more mortgages from certain minority groups, had very little to do with the subprime boom and decreased lending standards. Fannie and Freddie bonds defaulted at a lower rate than those sold to wholly private firms, and there was clear market demand for housing securities absent any government pressure.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall, on the other hand, at least bears some of the blame for allowing companies like Citigroup and Bank of America to get so big. While the law had, since 1933, separated the activities of commercial and investment banks, its repeal allowed the biggest commercial banks in the country to expand their proprietary trading.
With that said, the repeal of Glass-Steagall was mostly symbolic—banking regulators had been allowing more trading at commercial banks for decades before its official repeal in 1999. And the most notable failures of the financial crisis—Lehman, Bear, AIG, Fannie, Freddie—would not have been affected at all by the law. Continue reading →
We’re done with the book reviews, but John S isn’t done breaking down the books of the financial crisis. We still have a few things left to cover, most importantly….
The Whole Truth…
Rankings!
Obviously I wasn’t going to read 16 books and NOT rank them.
It was a little hard to determine the criteria. Some of the books were well-written, but not especially good at delving into the causes; others were thorough but boring; some were great but a little off-topic. If someone asked me to recommend one of these books, I wouldn’t answer until I got more information about what exactly she was looking for. If, however, she were somehow unable to clarify, I would recommend them in this order:
On the eighth day, John S reviewed two more books of the financial crisis, including the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report.
Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, The Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America
by Greg Farrell 2010
Having read accounts of the failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, it seemed appropriate to read a book about the third investment bank claimed by the financial crisis: Merrill Lynch. Of course, Merrill Lynch didn’t fail outright—it was sold to Bank of America, making the story slightly more complex. Greg Farrell’s book, Crash of the Titans, is really a soap opera about how two banks ended up in a reluctant and unhappy marriage.
The first step towards this malignant matrimony was the downfall of Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch occupied an odd position on Wall Street. On the one hand, it’s probably the investment bank normal people are the most familiar with, thanks to its “thundering herd” of brokers. On the other hand, it suffered from a clear inferiority complex for not being as profitable or as elite as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley.
In its quest to catch Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch became one of the leaders in the CDO market, holding more CDO assets than any other bank. As the housing bubble inflated, this led a streak of immense profitability, but the lust for profits blinded many Merrill executives to the risks they were exposed to. Continue reading →
The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It
by Scott Patterson 2010
“Quant” is a word that pops up over and over again in descriptions of the financial crisis, but it never really gets defined. It tends to be used on Wall Street the way “sabermetrician” gets used in baseball or “Nate Silver” is used in politics: It just means someone who uses math in a slightly unconventional way while doing his job.
Nevertheless, these “quants” were blamed for much of the financial crisis, as those industry “experts” who concocted elaborate formulas showing that housing prices would never fall and homeowners would never default. I turned to Patterson’s book to find out who, exactly, these “quants” were and why their formulas—unlike Nate Silver’s and Billy Beane’s—went so awry.
Patterson’s title bills the book as a story of these “new… math whizzes,” and the cover even contains a quote from Warren Buffett: “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”* Unfortunately, Patterson’s book focuses primarily on the world of quantitative hedge funds. In other words, instead of focusing on those within the banks themselves and how these whizzes were used to justify massive trading strategies, Patterson’s book is about some of the most successful outsiders. Continue reading →
We’re up to Part VI, which means we’re over halfway through the breakdown of financial crisis literature. Today John S looks at what might be the best book about the crisis, and what might be the most fun.
All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, 2010
If I had to recommend just one book about the financial crisis, it would probably be All the Devils Are Here. It’s not necessarily the best-written or most thrilling book on the subject, but it’s the most comprehensive, and perhaps the only book that captures just how nuanced the causes of the crisis were. Instead of focusing on one bank or one cause or one period of time, McLean and Nocera trace the origins of the crisis back decades, and examine precisely how things evolved.
One thing they illustrate well is how Wall Street tends to create something useful, and then, in the course of trying to find new ways to make money off it, turns it into a weapon of wealth destruction. In the 1980s, for example, mortgage-backed securities seemed like a great idea. Grouping mortgages together into one security allowed investors to introduce capital to the industry without being subjected to the inefficiencies or risks inherent in one mortgage or even one region. They also helped the GSEs’ bottom lines, of course.
But as time went on, these securities changed the mortgage market itself. Wall Street’s demand for mortgages to securitize lowered lending standards and increased shady lending practices, like ARMs and NINJAs. Continue reading →
Welcome to Part IV of our eleven-part breakdown of the books of the financial crisis. Having trouble keeping up? Then check out this page for all previous and future posts in the series.
On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System
by Henry Paulson 2010
The unifying element of the first four books was pessimism: Whether it was Ritholtz’s scorn for those in power, Morgenson’s search for someone to blame, Lewis’s tragic tale, or Sorkin’s narrative of disaster, all four books had decidedly bleak outlooks on the events. Since there is only so much despair one person can read about, I wanted to read the account of someone who would be sympathetic to the policy-makers and CEOs who everyone else blamed.
Henry Paulson was perfect. If the financial panic of 2008 has a face, it’s Paulson’s. As Treasury Secretary during the collapse, he was the one who told Congress of the dangers of Fannie and Freddie (in his infamous squirt gun analogy), who proposed TARP, and who ultimately dispensed the bailouts. And unlike the other figures prominently involved—Geithner, Bernanke—he faded from public view almost immediately after the disaster passed.
Reading Paulson’s book, though, it is hard to dislike him. His prose is straightforward and he comes across as an upstanding, diligent worker with integrity. He’s honest, but polite and gracious to a fault—despite presiding over what many would describe as a complete disaster, he has nothing but kind words for almost everyone involved.* He worked for Presidents Nixon and Bush—two of the least popular Presidents of the last 50 years, if not ever—but says nothing negative about either. He clashed with another prominent public figure, Jon Corzine, for the top spot at Goldman Sachs, but all he says about that is “frankly, the pairing was never right.” Continue reading →
No Pun Intended 