There is not a word of truth or a particle of understanding in this book.
The answers are academic cant, the solutions are academic gibberish.
This problem - the collapse of the mortgage market - was caused by the government - pure and simple.
It's the government's job to fix it, and it's our job as taxpayers to pay for it.
Whether we like it or not, the government, not business, caused this mess.
The way to avoid this in the future is to take the power to set lending standards out of the hands of the government.
* * * * * J B K * * * * *
San Francisco
Reuters) - Two years ago, a poisonous brew of bad economics, lax regulation, and egregious behavior boiled over, scalding the financial system and pitching the United States into its steepest downturn since the Great Depression.
The antidotes to the crisis, concocted by many of the players who stirred the original toxic brew, have pulled the U.S. economy back from the brink.
But those remedies won't prevent future crises, Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics, writes in "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy" (Norton, $27.95).
In contrast to the regulations that emerged from the Great Depression, which promoted growth and stability, the response to this crisis has led to a less-competitive financial system dominated by banks that are too big to fail, he writes.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62A3N820100311?type=GCA-Economy2010
