All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
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“Hell is empty, and
all the devils are here.”
-Shakespeare, The Tempest
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Bethany McLean made her bones as the author behind the Enron book, Smartest Guys in the Room; Joe Nocera is a prize winning journalist who covers business for the NYT (previously he covered busienss for Fortune and GQ).
The book asks who should shoulder the blame for the crisis: Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? Do we heap scorn on greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers? All of the above-and more.
All the Devils Are Here goes back several decades to uncover how we got into this mess. Among the various “devils” you’ll encounter: Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide, Roland Arnall, Ameriquest subprime lender, Hank Greenberg, who built AIG, Stan O’Neal CEO of Merrill Lynch, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, Franklin Raines, CEO of Fannie Mae, Brian Clarkson, CEO of Moody’s, Alan Greenspan, the legendary maestro of the Federal Reserve.
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Reviews:
“Two of our finest business journalists have written a thorough account of the origins of the financial crisis. More than offering just a backward look, it helps explain the most troubling business headlines of the moment, as well as those that are certain to come.”
–The New York Times Book Review
>“The authors succeed in pulling the jumbled pieces of the financial crisis together and showing how it flowed from human foibles.”
–Bloomberg BusinessWeek
>“Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera methodically reconstruct the 30 years that culminated in the Great Recession, years in which Wall Street’s relentless greed and Washington’s delusional regulators jointly built a time bomb – and thwarted any attempt to disarm it…. The depth of reporting is enormous.”
–Time
>“Not for a page do the authors let any political theory or party off the hook as they deftly weave arguments, refutations and facts upon facts in this gripping account.”
–The Associated Press
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The fully authorized excerpt, placed here with permission of the publisher, has been removed from scribd as a violation of copyrights by the same publisher as of May 3, 2022.
Publishing is a funny business, filled with very very stupid people, hellbent on going out of business as fast as possible.
