About this title: The inimitable Thomas Sowell casts a critical eye at the bubble that shattered the world economy - a cautionary tale that will be sure to spark controversy. Scary headlines and scarier statistics tell the story of a financial crisis on a scale not seen in decades. Moreover, this is a worldwide financial crisis. Financial institutions on both sides of the Atlantic have either collapsed or have been saved from collapse by government bailouts, as a result of buying securities based on housing values that eroded or evaporated. This financial tsunami has been followed by a political flood of ...
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Binding: Spoken Word Compact Disc
Publisher: Blackstone Audio Inc
Date Published: 2009-05-14
ISBN-13:9781433294075ISBN:1433294079
Description: NEW. Spoken Word Compact Disc. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781433294075. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Basic Books
Date Published: 2009-05-12
ISBN-13:9780465018802ISBN:0465018807
Description: NEW. Hardcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780465018802. read more
Binding: MP3 CD
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781433294082ISBN:1433294087
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Basic Books
Date Published: 2009-04-24
ISBN-13:9780465018802ISBN:0465018807
Description: Good. Looks good from the outside, however this book contains highlighting/underlining throughout the book. We usually ship within 24 hours. read more
Description: New. 0465018807 SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION. Great Book at a Great Value! read more
"Wonderful book. The housing bubble was concentrated in a few metropolitan areas. In those areas, home buyers were spending a lager percentage of their income on housing. Banks were strong armed into lending to sub prime borrowers. Obstinate in the face of empiricism, politicians continued to push home ownership. Ill conceived financial products were created to make home ownership possible where it was not feasible. Now we are being offered 'solutions' to these problems. He ends with the following quote:
"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." - Paul Johnson"
"Sowell's The Housing Boom and Bust is a thorough and scathing analysis of government interference in the housing and lending market, from land-use restrictions to the corrupt influence of Congress over federal regulators to the Community Reinvestment Act to the artificially low interest rates of the Federal Reserve. Sowell convincingly demonstrates that ever-increasing levels of government meddling converted the US home mortgage market -- which had been the most reliably profitable business anywhere in the world for more than a century -- into a loser requiring massive government subsidies, but not a national loser, just a loser in those metro areas with the most active municipal, state, and federal players; most localities had significantly less government interference and suffered neither the boom nor the bust.
As Sowell notes, members of Congress don't help people by forcing a bank to give them loans that they can't repay, and now that the market has actually delivered "affordable housing" by bringing down artificially high home prices, the government actively seeks to reverse the decrease in home prices. Why? Because its goal isn't actually affordable housing. Sowell's analysis shows convincingly that the goal of elected officials (read: thugs) like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd is to subsidize special interest groups in exchange for their campaign donations and whatever favors they can extort from banks.
In the end, this book proves Margaret Thatcher's maxim that "Reality is conservative" better than any other treatise I know of."
"A good read and overview of the gov't policies that lead to the bust/economic downturn. Would have given it 4 stars but felt Sowell paid lip service to the greed of the private sector when it came to the bust. And I do think it is a good policy to put limits on executive pay and allow shareholders to vote on their packages as part of the bailout packages or in general practice (even though I'm against bailing out companies that made poor/greedy decisions that lead to their demise, good riddance). It is taking monies away from the shareholders and driving up consumer costs and about time it happens."
"Thomas Sowell is always a good read, and this is a good summary of the financial crisis, although it is one sided. However, when the latest polls indicate the 79% blame Wall Street for the financial crisis, someone needs to write a short, simple one-sided narrative explaining government's substantial role in the crisis. This is it.
The best thing Sowell does is to point us to the obvious. The underlying cause was the fact that people were overextended in their home mortgages. That is obvious, yet this fact is often conveniently ignored by politicians and the media. When you ask the next question, why? Sowell points out all the government actions which encouraged this condition. It's easy to do, and that is probably why many don't want to start with the underlying cause. It is much easier to blame greed and lack of regulations that allowed risky behavior on the part of the Wall Street financial firms.
I have read a lot about the financial crisis, but have yet to find a book that can clearly explain all the causes and the relative contributions each cause made to the crisis. I think it is because everyone's political agendas get mixed up in the analysis."
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