In this forthright and incisive book, Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz explains how America exported bad economics, bad policies, and bad behavior to the rest of the world, only to cobble together a haphazard and ineffective response when the markets finally seized up. Stiglitz then outlines a way to restore the balance between markets and government, address the inequalities of the global financial system, and demand more good ideas (and less ideology)...

Why every president from Reagan through Obama has put Wall Street before Main Street

Over the last few decades, Washington's firmly held belief that if you make investors happy, a booming economy will follow has caused an economic crisis in Asia, hardship in Latin America, and now a severe recession in America and Europe. How did the best and brightest of our time allow this to happen? Why have these disasters done nothing to change

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As the recession continues, President Barack Obama has chastised the "fat cats" who feast off government bailout money while unemployment remains high and smaller businesses struggle.But according to business reporter Charles Gasparino, Obama is faking his outrage, and his calls for new policies to rein in banks that are "too big to fail" are just pabulum. In reality, Obama has climbed into bed with Wall Street CEOs, giving them what they want so...

Over the last two years, the United States has observed, with some horror, the explosion and collapse of entire segments of the housing market, especially those driven by subprime and alternative or "exotic" home mortgage lending. The unfortunately timely Foreclosed explains the rise of high-risk lending and why these newer types of loans-and their associated regulatory infrastructure-failed in substantial ways. Dan Immergluck narrates the boom in...

"The recent financial crisis was an accident, a 'perfect storm' fueled by an unforeseeable confluence of events that unfortunately combined to bring down the global financial systems. And policy makers? They did everything they could, given their limited authority. It was all a terrible, unavoidable accident. Or at least this is the story told and retold by a chorus of luminaries that includes Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke,...

The 2008 financial crisis, like the Great Depression, was a world-historical event. What caused it will be debated for years, if not generations. The conventional narrative is that the financial crisis was caused by Wall Street greed and insufficient regulation of the financial system. That narrative produced the Dodd-Frank Act, the most comprehensive financial-system regulation since the New Deal. There is evidence, however, that the Dodd-Frank Act...

Today's financial crisis is the result of dismal failures on the part of regulators, market analysts, and corporate executives. Yet the response of the American government has been to bail out the very institutions and individuals that have wrought such havoc upon the nation. Are such massive bailouts really called for? Can they succeed?Robert E. Wright and his colleagues provide an unbiased history of government bailouts and a frank assessment of...