The Antiplanner continues to read recent books about the 2008 financial crisis, but there are definite diminishing returns. I just finished Roger Lowenstein‘s The End of Wall Street and found it disappointing. It covered almost exactly the same ground as Too Big to Fail, but unlike the latter book, which was based mainly on interviews, Lowenstein’s book seems to be based heavily on articles and op eds in various newspapers and magazines.
The book is poorly referenced–sometimes a citation to a critical point lists nothing more than a person’s name–and somewhat superficial in its description of complex events. Lowenstein focuses heavily on subprime mortgages, but (as I’ll explain in detail in a later post) I don’t think they were the real problem. “Rampant speculation (and abuse) in mortgages was surely the primary cause of the bubble,” he concludes, but he doesn’t even sound like he believes it. There was just as much mortgage “abuse” in Texas as in California, yet Texas had no bubble. Rampant speculation only takes place after prices are already rapidly rising, so such speculation by itself can’t have caused the bubble.
