Word: lowenstein
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...novelist lined up as many dramatic events as the author does here, his work would be blasted as contrived. Lowenstein, a magnificent business writer, creates an almost novelistic accounting of the all-too-real 2008 financial collapse. The book opens in late summer: Lehman Brothers is a hairbreadth away from collapse, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been taken over by the feds, and AIG is veering toward disaster. After several decades of laissez-faire regulation, Wall Street is crying out to be rescued by the government...
...irony is overpowering, says Lowenstein. "Less than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when prevailing orthodoxy held that the free market could govern itself, and when financial regulation seemed destined for near irrelevancy, the United States was compelled to socialize lending and mortgage risk, and even the ownership of banks, on a scale that would have made Lenin smile...
...Lowenstein is terrific at walking the reader through complex economic events, and he artfully traces the development of the subprime-mortgage disaster. It sounds like a lofty ideal when Angelo Mozilo, a co-founder of Countrywide, says in a speech in 2003, "Expanding the American dream of homeownership must continue to be our mission, not solely for the purpose of benefiting corporate America, but more importantly, to make our country a better place." Countrywide and others made mortgages available to anyone with a pulse, aided and abetted by Wall Street, which created the market for exotic mortgage derivatives...
...Lowenstein has a pitch-perfect sense of the Street's monumental recklessness. The chorus line of overpaid bad actors in this book is endless. Held out for particular scorn is Lehman CEO Richard Fuld, who has "the daring of a gambler who believes, deep down, that he will always be able to play the last card." Maybe he did, yet as the book impressively shows, Fuld lost...
...Roger Lowenstein on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan: "Greenspan's was a Rousseauean vision of markets as untainted social organisms--evolved, as it were, from a state of nature. (It overlooked the obvious point that markets were also human constructs--made...