Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson

This post from Powerline contains a brief (less than 5 minutes) video of an interview by Sean Hannity with Gretchen Morgenson who wrote this book "Reckless Endangerment".  The book chronicles the events which led to the financial meltdown that has left our economy in shambles.  There are several other books out there on the meltdown but it appears this one is the most complete at least in terms of holding all the various players involved over many years to account.  A must read.

Dodd-Frank, the real culprit according to Robert Tracinski of TIA Daily

 In this article Tracinski blames the Dodd-Frank financial reform act for the uncertainty and confusion in financial quarters that has impeded and virtually stopped the flow of credit necessary for a real recovery to begin.  Tracinski offers no solutions to the implosion on Wall Street that led to our current dilemma but suggests that the Dodd-Frank bill is simply making things worse inasmuch as it blames the financial collapse on venal bankers and proposes bureaucratic means of controlling them in the future.  It is this expansion of the administrative state that democrats so love that keeps the recovery at bay since the rules and regulations required by the new law have yet to be written and agree upon by regulators.  Tracinski sees us as about half way through this process.  But even so once the process is completed, things are not likely to get any better because the rules (already in place in some cases) are so vague as to continue to lead to uncertainty and therefore inaction by the banks to begin extending credit more freely once again.  In Tracinski's view once again the political class has succeeded in shifting the blame for the crises to the private sector and is proceeding to make things worse by further restricting the financial industry from doing its job.  All in all this is a fairly lucid explanation of what's happening now without shedding much light on what would be effective to prevent another such crises in the future short of keeping the government from making things worse, as it always manages to do.

The latest "meltdown" explanation

Mona Charon's review here of "Reckless Endangerment" by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, both NYT reporters, is the latest in a number of books on the cause of the 2007 financial meltdown.  Based on most of the other books out there, Mona and Joshua have got it about right:  the principal cause of the "meltdown" was the politicization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the Democrat Party over a period of time dating back to the '60's.  Jim Johnson, a democrat political operative for many decades, and all those like Frank Raines, Jamie Gorelick and their supporters in the Congress, including Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and of course Barak Obama. Mona points out the great effort on the part of the MSM to rewrite history in order to cover for these liberals now on going through all their outlets.  Their main distortion is the notion that the greedy Wall Street bankers were the primary cause, entirely overlooking the fact these "greedy" types were merely providing the means to carry out the policies of the political class writing the laws that encouraged and enabled the whole scheme to become reality in the first place.  At this point in time no amount of dissembling by the water carriers for the democrats can cover up this scandal.

Cause of the financial meltdown via Commentary Magazine

In February of 2009, Peter Wallison carefully presented the real reasons for the financial meltdown in the article from Commentary Magazine.  Much has been written since about the cause and reason this meltdown occurred, however Wallison's piece has stood the test of time as a definitive explication of the whole sordid event.  Cutting to the chase one could say that the underlying cause of this fiasco was the politicization of the housing market.