Westerly Sun Column

By Diane Hansen, Business Manager

I love leaning back on a Saturday afternoon with a non-fiction book. I wake up so refreshed, my bookmark toward the end of Chapter One! Not so with the Gretchen Morgenson/Joshua Rosner expose, “ReckleS$ Endangerment.” They live up to the subtitle promise – “How outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption led to Economic Armageddon.”

What’s in this book has been in the news, for years. And it’s largely gone over my head. So I wanted to find a book that could clearly explain the underlying issues and actually enlighten me about how the real estate bubble happened, who blew it up (in both directions) and how we could try to protect ourselves. I had heard Morgenson promoting her book on Public Radio. So I went to the Westerly Library website and put the book on reserve. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but got help from the Reference Librarians. When the book was available I got an email, took it off the reserve shelf, and checked it out.

I read that there was plenty of warning of crisis in the making, from the late 1980’s Savings and Loan crisis to the 2008 government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Government employees, journalists, academics, and legislators at the state and federal levels all tried to put forward the devastation that could occur from the narrowly focused goal of homeownership for all Americans. It’s distressing that even the best research, even the most diligent regulators, can be suppressed by the powerful, entrenched bureaucrats, politically connected business people, and the politicians whose careers they support.

What most impressed me was the ability of the authors to clearly explain volumes of information from before, during, and after the real estate bubble bursting. By putting their research into essentially chronological order, and addressing one major player at a time, they help unravel what was a tightly interwoven scheme to put policy over practicality.

If you don’t have four or so hours to read the entire book, focus on Chapter Thirteen. It reads like a who-done-it.

I’ve checked out another book from the Westerly Library - “The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis.” The reviews say it’s a page-turner. I’m hoping so. If not, it might be time for that nap.