http://www.thenation.com/article/162141/mass-prosperity-severe-recession-fifty-yearsThe financial crisis of 2008 produced a rash of books on Wall Street covering these events from the point of view of all the major investment banks, politicians, mortgage dealers and everyone else within arm’s reach. Judging from most of them, though, you might think the problems in our financial sector go back only a decade and originated in the schemes of Wall Street’s financial geniuses to repackage bad mortgages into super-safe assets.
The story is now a familiar one: speculation in mortgage-backed securities added steam to a runaway housing bubble. When the house of cards eventually collapsed, it required a taxpayer bailout to save Wall Street while the subsequent bad debt lead to the most severe recession since the Great Depression.
Even the most ambitious books generated by the meltdown go back only fifteen years or so and discuss such things as the bailout of the hedge fund ironically titled Long-Term Capital Management; the removal of the last piece of New Deal banking regulation, Glass-Steagall; Goldman Sachs going public; and the isolation of the few regulators, such as Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who sounded the alarm about the rapidly expanding derivatives market.
These books, however, describe a world that already existed, one that functioned inside a financialized economy dominated by a conservative political system and libertarian economic policies.
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