The Antiplanner finished reading Too Big to Fail, a 539-page tome describing the events of the financial crisis from the Bear Stearns collapse in March, 2008 to the Treasury’s forced purchase of billions of dollars worth of shares in nine major banks in October, 2008. New York Times reporter Sorkin says the book is based on “more than five hundred hours of interviews with more than two hundred individuals who participated directly in the events surrounding the financial crisis.”

With the exception of an eleven-page epilogue, the author makes no apparent attempt to interject his own opinions about what happened. As such, the book represents the best and worst of modern journalism: the best because it appears to be a frank recitation of events on Wall Street, in the Fed, and the U.S. Treasury; and the worst because the accuracy of that recitation depends on who the author interviewed (whose names he doesn’t specifically reveal).

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The 2008 financial crisis has proven to be a bonanza for at least one industry: Book publishers have issued dozens of tomes about what went wrong and how to fix it. Lately, the Antiplanner has been reading as many of these as possible.

Most of the authors have an axe to grind and many blame the crisis on one chief player: the Federal Reserve, private bankers, the mortgage industry, bond rating companies, politicians trying to increase homeownership, etc. Of course, loyal Antiplanner readers know the real culprit was growth-management planning, a thesis few of the book writers recognize–the main exception being Thomas Sowell in The Housing Boom and Bust.

In reading the other books, my goal has been to sift out the overblown rhetoric about greed and malice to find as many useful facts and insights as possible. Here are a few of the more interesting points.

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