Books on financial crises

Steve Fraser reviews Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick, and discusses its relatively new genre:

Melodrama and moral drama supply the oxygen for this new literature. So we have books called Age of Greed, The Greed Merchants, The Big Con, Zombie Capitalism, The Great American Stick-Up, Bad Money, The End of Wall Street, The Banksters, Griftopia. Most of these books share a story line about what happened. An excess of greed nurtured in the highest precincts of the country’s financial establishment and ignored, deliberately or negligently, by those public authorities charged with monitoring and reining in these out-sized appetites, led inexorably to the near terminal breakdown, whose after-shocks reverberate to this day.

Madrick puts the case succinctly: “It was the house of cards built on Wall Street greed, unchecked by Washington regulators, that created the nation’s credit crisis...and caused the most severe recession in the United States since the Great Depression. “ He makes explicit what is often the implicit assumption of this whole corpus; namely, that “the collapse was the product of decisions of individuals, set upon making fortunes and becoming one of the kings of the mountains, not the inevitable failure of a system.” There is a kind of drear optimism about this premise because it strongly suggests that heightened vigilance in the future—perhaps a code of strictly enforced blue laws to punish financial gluttony—can put things right again.

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