Something else: they're impressively incomplete in their coverage. I can't really fault them for this: the story is too protean for one book anyway. But they do seem to go fishing where the fish are; so, good stuff on Merrill and AIG and Goldman, moderately good on Ameriquest and Countrywide (have they been reading Michael Hudson's Monster
But here's a takeaway: no surprise to say that the uproar had many components. My point is that in retrospect I think we saw some coming; others, really not. That is: careful students understood that real estate was an unsustainable bubble; that a savings glut brought trouble in its wake; that trade imbalances posed a long-term threat (still do, IMO). But I don't think many but outsiders realized just how glow-in-the-dark potentially lethal banking had become. Yes, yes, we know about the John Paulsons, the Andrew Redleaf
We know now how cruelly wrong that was: big firms did blow themselves up, and others imbibed billions of our taxpayer dollars to escape it. The real virtue of books like McLean/Nocera is that they give us a beginning taste of just how Guignol dysfunctional big banking really was.
Or is.