Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780393067941)

In Busted, Andrew bluntly recounts his misadventures in mortgages and goes one step further to describe the brokers, lenders, Wall Street players, and Washington policymakers who helped bring that money to his door. The result is a penetrating and often acerbic look at the binge and bust that nearly bankrupted the United States.

Enabled by know-nothing complacency in Washington, Wall Street wizards used "collateralized debt obligations," "conduits," and other inscrutable financial "innovations" to put American home financing into hyperdrive. Millions of Americans abandoned the safety of thirty-year, fixed-rate mortgages and loaded up on debt. While regulators insisted that the markets knew best, Wall Street firms fragmented and repackaged unsound loans into securities that the rating agencies stamped with triple-A seals of approval.

Andrews describes a remarkably democratic debacle that made fools out of people up and down the financial food chain. From a confessional meeting with Alan Greenspan to a trek through the McMansion bubble of the OC, he maps the arc of the Frankenstein loans that brought the American economy to the brink.

With on-the-ground reporting from the frothiest quarters of the crisis, Andrews locates what is likely to be the high-water mark in America's long-term embrace of higher borrowing, higher risk-taking, and the fervent belief in the possibility of easy profits.

Author: Edmund L. Andrews
ISBN-10: 0393067947
ISBN-13: 9780393067941
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 06/01/2009
Pages: 238
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.50w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/2009 pg. 61
Publishers Weekly 04/27/2009 pg. 124
Booklist 06/01/2009 pg. 12
People Weekly 07/06/2009 pg. 53
New York Times Book Review 07/05/2009 pg. 5