All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis ebook

by Joe Nocera,Bethany McLean

Joe Nocera Bethany McLean Economics English

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind are Fortune senior writers. McLean, a former investment banking analyst for Goldman Sachs, lives in New York City

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind are Fortune senior writers. McLean, a former investment banking analyst for Goldman Sachs, lives in New York City. Her March 2001 article in Fortune, "Is Enron Overpriced?," was the first in a national publication to openly question the company's dealings. Start reading All the Devils Are Here on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera goes back several decades weaving hidden history of financial crisis the way no book has ever done. Sometimes the devil is very patient. He establishes his plan, sets things in motion far in advance, allows something that is initially good to occur, and over many years’ lures one person or one group in at a time, feeding on their ignorance, fear, and greed. Then, in the end, he seeks to destroy them all. Thankfully because there is a higher power, he never fully succeeds; but in 2007 and 2008, he came close.

All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis is a nonfiction book by authors Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera about the 2008 financial crisis. It details how the financial crisis bubbled up from a volatile, and bipartisan, mixture of government meddling and laissez-faire. It concludes it was not an accident, that banks understood the big picture before the crisis happened but continued with bad practices.

And here is where All the Devils Are Here provides a service even for . The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. By Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera.

And here is where All the Devils Are Here provides a service even for those who have tried diligently to keep up with the literature of the crisis. McLean and Nocera enable us to grasp the latest depressing news about lenders trying to take possession of suburban homes for which they cannot find the relevant paperwork or for which the paperwork seems fabricated. As McLean and Nocera recount, in April 2005 Greenspan airily dismissed worries that his policies could encourage irresponsible mortgage practices.

According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here

According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. Shakespeare, The Tempest. As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Just as McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room was hailed as the best Enron book on a crowded shelf, so will All the Devils Are Here be remembered for finally making sense of the meltdown and its consequences.

Аудиокнига "All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis", Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera. Читает Dennis Boutsikaris. Мгновенный доступ к вашим любимым книгам без обязательной ежемесячной платы. Слушайте книги через Интернет и в офлайн-режиме на устройствах Android, iOS, Chromecast, а также с помощью Google Ассистента. Скачайте Google Play Аудиокниги сегодня!

Электронная книга "All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis", Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera.

Электронная книга "All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis", Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera. Эту книгу можно прочитать в Google Play Книгах на компьютере, а также на устройствах Android и iOS. Выделяйте текст, добавляйте закладки и делайте заметки, скачав книгу "All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis" для чтения в офлайн-режиме.

According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, the real answer is all of the above-and more. Many devils helped bring hell to the economy

According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, the real answer is all of the above-and more. Many devils helped bring hell to the economy. And the full story, in all of its complexity and detail, is like the legend of the blind men and the elephant. Almost everyone has missed the big picture. Almost no one has put all the pieces together. All the Devils Are Here goes back several decades to weave the hidden history of the financial crisis in a way no previous book has done.

McLean and Nocera recount the end of that meeting beautifully: Listening to him, Breit realized that O'Neal seemed . I would never use the words "if you're going to read one book on the financial crisis," because there are just too many must-reads in the category.

McLean and Nocera recount the end of that meeting beautifully: Listening to him, Breit realized that O'Neal seemed to have no idea that Merrill's risk management function had been sidelined. The meeting finally cam to an end; Breit shook O'Neal's hand and wished him luck. And because its attention is so all encompassing, this book requires a good deal more patience than others. But McLean and Nocera have done something important, special and singular in All the Devils Are Here, and I really hope you all read it.

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."--Shakespeare, The Tempest As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers? According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, the real answer is all of the above-and more. Many devils helped bring hell to the economy. And the full story, in all of its complexity and detail, is like the legend of the blind men and the elephant. Almost everyone has missed the big picture. Almost no one has put all the pieces together. All the Devils Are Here goes back several decades to weave the hidden history of the financial crisis in a way no previous book has done. It explores the motivations of everyone from famous CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers, analysts, and Wall Street traders. It delves into the powerful American mythology of homeownership. And it proves that the crisis ultimately wasn't about finance at all; it was about human nature. Among the devils you'll meet in vivid detail: • Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide, who dreamed of spreading homeownership to the masses, only to succumb to the peer pressure-and the outsized profits-of the sleaziest subprime lending. • Roland Arnall, a respected philanthropist and diplomat, who made his fortune building Ameriquest, a subprime lending empire that relied on blatantly deceptive lending practices. • Hank Greenberg, who built AIG into a Rube Goldberg contraption with an undeserved triple-A rating, and who ran it so tightly that he was the only one who knew where all the bodies were buried. • Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, aloof and suspicious, who suffered from "Goldman envy" and drove a proud old firm into the ground by promoting cronies and pushing out his smartest lieutenants. • Lloyd Blankfein, who helped turn Goldman Sachs from a culture that famously put clients first to one that made clients secondary to its own bottom line. • Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae, who (like his predecessors) bullied regulators into submission and let his firm drift away from its original, noble mission. • Brian Clarkson of Moody's, who aggressively pushed to increase his rating agency's market share and stock price, at the cost of its integrity. • Alan Greenspan, the legendary maestro of the Federal Reserve, who ignored the evidence of a growing housing bubble and turned a blind eye to the lending practices that ultimately brought down Wall Street-and inflicted enormous pain on the country. Just as McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room was hailed as the best Enron book on a crowded shelf, so will All the Devils Are Here be remembered for finally making sense of the meltdown and its consequences.

Talvinl

This is not the sexiest book on the financial meltdown, but it probably is the most detailed, sober analysis of the lead-up to the crisis to come out so far. For a play-by-play of CEOs running around on Lehman weekend and dodging each other's calls (and not a single insight into why it all happened), go to Sorkin's Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the FinancialSystem--and Themselves. For indigestible (and largely irrelevant) inside baseball about Bear Stearns, see William Cohan's House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. For some of the outlandish characters in Hedge Fund Land who saw it all coming and made a killing, go to Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (still the best read on the crisis). For a detailed and informed road map to how we got here, read this book. McLean and Nocera carefully reverse engineer the current mess we are in and show us how the gigantic landfill of toxic assets was excavated over the course of three decades and progressively filled with some of the worst investments in the history of the modern world.

Each chapter provides a new domino. The first is mortgage securitization, the second is the appearance of non-bank mortgage originators and the subprime mortgage industry, the third is J.P. Morgan's invention of the collateralized debt obligation, the fourth was the anti-regulatory bias of the Greenspan Fed, the fourth is the Clinton administration's quashing of the CFTC's attempt to regulate derivatives, and so on and so on. Each step on the road to the Hell of the New Normal is chronicled with an objectivity that only toward the very end veers off toward condemnation (and there is plenty to go around).

Some of the material is familiar, some of it isn't. Although based on the mountain of work by many other journalists, it manages to unearth a lot of new information. Mostly, however, it provides a cathartic synthesis of the entire mess. If you sat through the financial crisis from 2007 to the present like the protagonist in Clockwork Orange --tied to a chair and forced to open your eyelids to see all of it-- then this is the book for you. Some of it will be familiar from early coverage of the initial glimmers of rampant excess in the subprime mortgage industry. Other facts are less familiar. I did not know, for example, that the bulk of subprime lending was actually refinancing. What that means is that many people on boring and safe thirty-year mortgages were enticed (or even scammed) into shifting to the toxic ARMs and other WMDs spewing out of the financial meth labs. Now that is scandalous.

Perhaps the one thing that surprised me most was the authors' impassioned plea that financial innovation actually does not serve any useful purpose. This runs counter to Robert Shiller's The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It. It is not up to the layman to decide, but I must say there are powerful arguments in here for curtailing the more audacious creations of the Wall Street Edisons.

Not the last word on the subject and maybe not definitive, but a great addition to the 2008 disaster genre. Talking and reading about it helps.

Kale

I've read a number of books and listened to many podcasts about the 2008 recession and the events leading up to it. As fascinating as finance is, especially finance that caused the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, I've been hard pressed to find a book that can capture my attention as much as this book has. While at times it can be hard to keep the people straight as the book jumps around between companies in a mostly chronological order, it is absolutely captivating and gives a unique and incredibly thorough history of what caused this crisis.

While many movies and pundits depict nothing more than greedy businessmen feeding on the prey that is the average American consumer, this book shows where these incredible financial products came from; from the advent of MBS, to advanced risk modeling and VaR, to the impact risk modeling had on the creation of derivatives, to the original hedging purpose behind credit defaults swaps, to CDOs, and to synthetic CDOs, it clearly depicts how most of these products were created with pure intentions but went down a dangerous path. The frightening reality of the rating agencies and failure of regulators is a tale that should be understood by many.

I highly recommend this book to anyone even moderately interested in this sort of topic. It is an excellent read.

Kieel

There is probably no better book on the financial crisis. The authors leave no stone unturned and manage to go into great detail without being tedious or boring. Best of all, rather than slant the story in favor of one causal hypothesis or another, they present such a wealth of data about who did what, and when, that readers can paint their own picture of what happened.

That said, the word “devils” in the title is misleading. It turns out to be a partial quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” In the context of the play, a shipwrecked mariner is bemoaning the intensity of a storm (and certainly the financial crisis was a storm) but for those unfamiliar with the allusion, it gives the implication that the actors in the financial crisis were devils – something that the book makes clear isn’t true.

Despite the catchy title, the story is not about devils. As bad, weak, greedy and stupid as some of the players were, the outcome was clearly the result of groupthink, incestuous amplification, or perhaps what author Diane Vaughan called the social normalization of deviance. Everybody got on the same bandwagon, including the federal government. Governmental mandates and quasi-governmental organizations like Fannie Mae were particularly instrumental in driving the buildup of what later became toxic assets.

In summary, if you want to understand the financial crisis and you’re not on a witch hunt, this book is for you.

elektron

I've read a number of books about the recent housing crash, and this book is by far the best. Some reviews have said that it doesn't assign blame. I'm not sure what they were reading, because there is plenty of blame to go around from Wall Street to the rating agencies to Fanny & Freddie to our elected representatives to the regulators... and let's not forget that person you see each morning in the mirror. There's plenty of blame to go around.

This book starts 30 years ago and shows the events and players involved in building the path to this crash. If you already have a simple answer in your head as to who to blame, then move on. This book is not for you. But if you really want to understand the background, then this is for you.

Yes there are a few errors, but nothing significant enough to keep you from understanding and getting the key points. It will help you understand the interplay between wall street, banks, mortgage companies (and their tricks), Fannie & Freddie, the highly structured derivatives, and hopefully you will be much smarter in dealing with some of these organizations in the future.

Highly recommended.