The authors cover each area with the
technical skills of the consummate experts they are, but with a political sensitivity that finessed the issue of blame
and culpability. Even though they named
all of the players, they left it up to the reader to draw conclusions about the
guilt or innocence of the players. Thus,
they were much too careful in
avoiding any finger pointing. Thus I finished
the book with the very uneasy feeling that all their work was in vain: At some point blame must be assessed if systemic problems of this nature are to be fixed
once and for all, so that similar ones can be avoided in the future. But in this book, as in officialdom itself,
there was, by and large, no such assessment.
Very few exceptions:
Goldman
Sachs and Wells Fargo disclosed last Tuesday that they were facing inquiries
from the Securities and Exchange Commission over mortgage-related investments
offered to investors several years ago.
Other banks, including JPMorgan Chase, are expected to disclose
receiving such notices as well.
The S.E.C.'s
enforcement director, Robert Khuzami, said at a news conference last month that
among the S.E.C.'s targets was disclosure:
whether banks selling mortgage-related
investments failed to fully account for the riskiness of the home loans bundled
in the securities.
The S.E.C.
and Goldman have tussled before, notably in 2010 when the agency sued the firm over
a bundle of mortgage-backed securities known as Abacus 2007-AC1, which had been
assembled to allow clients to bet against the housing market. Goldman
eventually settled the lawsuit for a paltry $550 million.
Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial
Collapse.
Meltdown, the documentary film linked
below,
is the story of the bankers who crashed the world, the leaders who struggled to
save it, and the ordinary families who got crushed.
September 2008 launched an
extraordinary chain of events: General Motors, the world's largest company,
went bust. Washington Mutual became the
world's largest bank failure. Lehman
Brothers became the world's largest bankruptcy ever, and the damage from all
this quickly spread "round the world, shattering global confidence in the
fundamental structures of the international economy.
Meltdown also
tells the stories of desperate foreclosed homeowners in California,
disillusioned autoworkers at the end of the line in Ontario and furious workers
in France who shocked the world by kidnapping their own bosses.
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