Important, interesting and pretty compelling as a narrative. Extra points for the hidden being exposed.

The incompetence! - possible genuine, possibly arranged. Got the poor nice and fucked, again. ( )

Well written. It certainly provides an inside perspective on the financial melt-down events of 2008. ( )

Lowenstein does a good job of taking the very complex and boiling it down to something accessible to most. ( )

Just a terrible, short-sighted, intellectually lazy book. As a review of the crisis, there are much better ones out there. And as far as analyzing this debacle, Lowenstein seems far too interested in laying blame at the door of the irresponsible schmucks who took the loans. No one in the public at large was counting on them for anything. We WERE counting on bank executives to be motivated by something other than short-sighted greed. His main interest in the book seems to be to take the blame off Wall Street as much as possible for what happened in the 2000s. He's an apologist.

A highly readable narrative of the conditions that led to the crash, the reactions (or non-reactions) of major business and governmental actors, and the mop-up operations that handed public money to private interests. I wish his 'afterword' had been a bit more detailed; for instance, it's 2012, we're in a world of record corporate profits (again) and stagnant wages (again), most economic indicators show us slipping into recession (again)- only this time the U.S. government is already in huge debt. Not a very comfortable time, and Lowenstein's the kind of guy who could probably help explain it. Maybe in another book?

Two small faults: first, it's focused entirely on the U.S., which is a shame, but then, it would have been 800 pages long if he'd tried to describe the international repercussions of this shitstorm. Second, sometimes the stories are a bit too detailed, given how similar they are were. But it's so readable that I didn't mind that too much. ( )