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All the devils are here : the hidden history of the financial crisis-Portfolio: Penguin (2010)
Hailed as "the best business book of 2010" (Huffington Post), this New York Times bestseller about the 2008 financial crisis brings the devastation of the Great Recession to life. As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should…
- Release Date
- 2011
- Length
- 503 pages
- Publisher
- Penguin
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Our Review
About the book
Journalists Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera trace the 2008 financial crisis back through decades of decisions by mortgage lenders, Wall Street banks, ratings agencies, regulators and government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae. The book argues that blame was widely shared and that the disaster grew out of incentives that rewarded everyone for looking away.
Our review
To our minds, the most thorough and even-handed account of how the 2008 meltdown was built, brick by careless brick, over twenty years.
Where many crisis books zero in on the final frantic weeks, McLean and Nocera go back to the beginning, to the invention of mortgage securities and the political push for homeownership. The result is a genuine history rather than a thriller, and it’s richer for it. The authors are superb at explaining complicated instruments in plain language, and their portraits of figures at Countrywide, Merrill Lynch and AIG are vivid without becoming caricatures.
It is dense. The sheer number of institutions and executives can blur together, and readers looking for a single villain will be frustrated by the book’s insistence that there were many. Some chapters on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac move slowly. But that patience is the point: the book shows how ordinary self-interest, multiplied across an industry, produced catastrophe. More than a decade on, we still think it essential for understanding modern finance.
What we loved
- Deep historical context reaching back decades before 2008
- Clear explanations of complex financial products
- A balanced view that spreads responsibility across many players
Keep in mind
- The large cast of executives and firms can be hard to follow
- Some sections on government-sponsored enterprises drag
Read it if you like
Readers of Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail, or McLean’s own The Smartest Guys in the Room.
The verdict
A rigorous, readable history of the crisis that rewards careful attention; the best single-volume explanation we know.
