The End of Wall Street

February 8, 2010
Lowenstein (When Genius Failed
) offers an overview of the causes and consequences of the financial crisis that rises above the glut of similarly themed books with its juicy behind-the-scenes detail and thoughtful analysis. He sets out to prove that the current financial difficulties began long before the summer of 2008, and long before the failure of Lehman Brothers. He begins with the history of Fannie Mae and the rise of mortgage-based securities and a dangerously burgeoning housing bubble, and hits the high points of the 2008-2009 news cycles, including Washington Mutual’s unwise loan strategies, the panic following Bear Stearns’s near-demise, a rash of foreclosures, TARP, and the woes of Citigroup. The insider knowledge lends flavor and context to many of these stories—a ranting Jim Cramer, Ben Bernanke’s loss of confidence, and Alan Greenspan’s astonishing 2008 testimony to Congress. Lowenstein’s strong knowledge of the source material and flair for the dramatic—and doomsday title—should draw readers who still wonder what went wrong and how.

February 15, 2010
A veteran financial/business journalist examines the past three years of economic collapse, chronicling actions and inactions from dozens of villains and a few heroes.

New York Times Magazine and Bloomberg contributor Lowenstein (While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis, 2008, etc.) teases out the upsetting saga of ignorance and greed without adding much to the story already related in newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets, not to mention a few books that beat his to bookstores. Nonetheless, he handles the recap skillfully, in language nonspecialists can understand. The author identifies more than 100 key players, almost all of them middle-aged white males from Wall Street, private mortgage companies, law firms, federal government agencies and the U.S. Congress. The narrative consistently demonstrates how almost all of those who could have halted the coming recession by employing common sense instead decided that the housing market would never collapse. When it did, nearly all of the smart guys in the room expressed shock, even though some of them had worried privately about a looming disaster. Among the most loathsome of the destroyers in Lowenstein's case are Angelo Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial, which wrote billions of dollars of home loans bound to default; and Joseph Cassano, an executive of insurance behemoth AIG who overexposed the company and its clients to the risks of credit-default swap losses. The leading heroes, chosen from a slim field, are Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who tried to discuss government regulation of derivatives a decade before the debacle; and Robert L. Rodriguez, chief executive of First Pacific Advisors, who protected his investors from the insane greed while trying to warn anybody who would listen about the house of cards about to collapse.

A well-delineated chronicle likely to cause readers to ask who put the clowns in charge of the circus, and why aren't they confined to prison cells.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from March 15, 2010
This account of the credit crisis of 200708 follows many others. Being later means that Lowenstein ("When Genius Fails") is able to extend his coverage into the 2009 recession and assess the financial carnage from the perspective of more time. He blames the origins of the crisis on the hubris of those in the financial industrywho deluded themselves into thinking that the credit markets would never retrenchand acquiescent politicians who saw loosened credit as a means of bolstering the economic prospects of the poor. He blames the depth of the crisis and resulting recession on early misjudgments by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bush administration; by the time they moved to shore up the banks in late 2008, it was necessary for the government to absorb much of the cost, which meant a weaker dollar, bigger government, higher unemployment, and increased taxes. Lowenstein is able to make arcane financial concepts like collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and leveraged balance sheets intelligible to average readers. VERDICT While CNBC reporter Charles Gasparino's "The Sellout" paints a more colorful picture and Andrew Ross Sorkin's frenetic "Too Big To Fail" focuses more specifically on the crucial events of early fall 2008, in breadth Lowenstein's work is the most complete yet to appear and is essential reading for everyone. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 12/09.]Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., PA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2010
Lowenstein has written four books on business trends and financial crises and has written for the Wall Street Journal for more than a decade. Although the events leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 have been chronicled from many angles, Lowenstein takes a deeper look at the systemic oversights that led up to that event. The media often blames the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the failure of AIG for the calamity that froze credit markets and ground the economy to a halt, leading to record job losses and the worst downturn since the Great Depression. But the structural damage to the financial system had already been in place by then, brought on by the speculative bubble in real estate nationwide, which was accelerated by lax regulation in subprime mortgages and the securitization of mortgages and endless derivatives, which spread the risk like toxic waste throughout the financial system. Lowenstein does a great job of explaining all this in understandable terms that unobtrusively avoid the injection of emotion and politics.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)