"Few readers," says The Economist "will have the energy to take in more than one or two books on the financial crisis." I've read about a dozen and I'm not sure that is anything to brag about. I suppose I've learned a fair amount, and I'd have to concede I've learned something from every one of the dozen. Indeed, I'd go this far: one of the grim satisfactions of the meltdown is the amount of high-quality second-draft commentary it is producing. And while inevitably there is a lot of overlap, just about everybody has his (her) own spin.
I set out to write some sort of over-view of review of the whole lot and then found out that I'd already done it, more or less. Perhaps I should just bring it home with this: the two books that least duplicate the others I have read re Alyssa Katz' Our Lot on "How Real Estate Came to Own Us," and Gary Gorton's Slapped by the Invisible Hand, on the meltdown as a bank run. My latest (I'm not quite done) is Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers, much better than its somewhat esoteric title, strong on the theme of banana republic. More about it later.
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