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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by Charles Gasparino, 2009, Harper Business, New York<\/p>\n
This book (lent to me by one of our friends in Florida) portrays the steps that led to the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008.\u00c2\u00a0 The tale is pretty fascinating as it traces the development of the original mortgage-backed securities back in the 1980’s to the crisis in the financial system\u00c2\u00a0they eventually caused.\u00c2\u00a0 The causes of the crisis, however, are complex and there is plenty of individuals who must share the blame.\u00c2\u00a0 What started out as a valid strategy\u00c2\u00a0using perfectly sound\u00c2\u00a0investment instruments eventually became what is now known as “toxic assets”.\u00c2\u00a0 How did this all happen?<\/p>\n
Gasparino traces the greed and poor decisions of Wall Street executives, compounded by a well-meaning, but misplaced\u00c2\u00a0government policy (home ownership for everybody as a\u00c2\u00a0way to climb the economic ladder), that led to the meltdown.\u00c2\u00a0 What was surprising to me is that the big\u00c2\u00a0meltdown was preceded by\u00c2\u00a0many similar, but smaller meltdowns that seemed to occur with the Wall Street firms every few years.\u00c2\u00a0 As Gasparino cited the many instances\u00c2\u00a0of over leverage and poor decisions over the decades,\u00c2\u00a0the line from the\u00c2\u00a0song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, kept coming to mind: “When will they ever learn?”<\/p>\n
In October of 2008 we were in Europe on a\u00c2\u00a0Danube River cruise.\u00c2\u00a0 I recall watching the\u00c2\u00a0TV at night as the meltdown went global.\u00c2\u00a0 This book, along with those memories,\u00c2\u00a0continue to remind me\u00c2\u00a0just how bad the situation was and how close we came to\u00c2\u00a0going into a deep depression, the likes of which we had never experienced.\u00c2\u00a0 I often\u00c2\u00a0wonder how there can be so many vocal critics of the “TARP” program, the bailouts, and the subsequent\u00c2\u00a0stimulus program.\u00c2\u00a0 There can be no question that some of these steps managed to avert a total meltdown.<\/p>\n
I took over two months to read this book and it was tough read for me, not because of the actual writing, but, I think, due to the subject material.\u00c2\u00a0 It was just hard to read so much bad information and about such stupidity that led us into this situation.\u00c2\u00a0 If I had one criticism of the book, I would say that it was somewhat repetitive.\u00c2\u00a0 I felt as if I had already read some of the information several times before I finished the book.\u00c2\u00a0 Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest as to what caused the collapse of our financial systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Charles Gasparino, 2009, Harper Business, New York This book (lent to me by one of our friends in Florida) portrays the steps that led to the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008.\u00c2\u00a0 The tale is pretty fascinating as …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[29,16,38],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-four-star","tag-economics","tag-non-fiction","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":643,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}