Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation by Daniel Gross

Product Details

Synopsis

The financial crisis that has gripped this country since last September has had so many twists and turns, it would make for a great drama — if it all were not so real and damaging. Companies are shutting down and laying off workers, 401ks are melting away, and the government is spending $700 billion dollars to bail out banks and financial institutions — and that's only the beginning. The financial services industry, and the many industries that depend on it — from housing to cars — is in intensive care.

So what happened? How did we get to this point of financial disaster? Is the economy just a huge, Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme? It is a complicated and confusing story — but Daniel Gross of Newsweek has a special gift for making complicated matters easy to understand and even entertaining. In Dumb Money, he offers a guide to the debacle and to what the future may hold. This is not so much a book about who did what, though that's part of the story. Rather, it pieces together the building blocks of the debt-fueled economy, and distills the theory and personalities behind our late, lamented easy money culture. Dumb Money is a book that finally lays it all out in an engaging way, and might just help people invest their money smartly until the gloom passes.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Mr. Gross gives the lay reader a succinct, breezy and sometimes snarky account of how "the Ownership Society" so quickly devolved "into Bailout Nation," how the Alan Greenspan era of low interest rates and "Cheap Money" (from late 2001 through 2004) begat the "Era of Dumb Money" (mid-2004 through mid-2006) of growing leverage and debt, and, eventually, the "Era of Dumber Money" (late 2006 to the calamities of 2008), in which "large, old-line investment banks waded chest-deep into the subprime" mortgage swamp, processing the debt (bundling it, selling its pieces and helping others trade them) in compulsive pursuit of lucrative fees, even as the housing bubble had started to burst.

Biography

Daniel Gross is a journalist, author, and editor who specializes in business history, political economy, and the money culture. He writes the ?Moneybox? column for Slate.com and contributes to the ?Economic View? column of the New York Times. He has worked as a reporter at The New Republic and has contributed to more than 60 publications. Since 1999, he has edited STERNbusiness, the semi-annual management journal published by New York University's Stern School of Business. Gross has appeared on CNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN, and on more than 35 radio programs, including NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross (no relation). In 2001, he was a fellow at the New America Foundation.

He is the author of three books: Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Times; Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance; and Generations of Corning: 150 Years in the Life of a Global Corporation, 1851-2001, co-authored with Davis Dyer.

A graduate of Cornell University, Gross holds an A.M. in American history from Harvard University.