Product Description

The fiasco that sank millions of Americans, including one journalist, who thought he knew better. A veteran New York Times economics reporter, Ed Andrews was intimately aware of the dangers posed by easy mortgages from fast-buck lenders. Yet, at the promise of a second chance at love, he succumbed to the temptation of subprime lending and became part of the economic catastrophe he was covering. In surprisingly short order, he amassed a staggering amount of debt and reached the edge of bankruptcy.

In Busted, Andrew bluntly recounts his misadventures in mortgages and goes one step further to describe the brokers, lenders, Wall Street players, and Washington policymakers who helped bring that money to his door. The result is a penetrating and often acerbic look at the binge and bust that nearly bankrupted the United States.

Enabled by know-nothing complacency in Washington, Wall Street wizards used "collateralized debt obligations," "conduits," and other inscrutable financial "innovations" to put American home financing into hyperdrive. Millions of Americans abandoned the safety of thirty-year, fixed-rate mortgages and loaded up on debt. While regulators insisted that the markets knew best, Wall Street firms fragmented and repackaged unsound loans into securities that the rating agencies stamped with triple-A seals of approval.

Andrews describes a remarkably democratic debacle that made fools out of people up and down the financial food chain. From a confessional meeting with Alan Greenspan to a trek through the McMansion bubble of the OC, he maps the arc of the Frankenstein loans that brought the American economy to the brink.

With on-the-ground reporting from the frothiest quarters of the crisis, Andrews locates what is likely to be the high-water mark in America's long-term embrace of higher borrowing, higher risk-taking, and the fervent belief in the possibility of easy profits. .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #90787 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-22
• Released on: 2009-05-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393067941
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. As I write in February 2009, I am four months past due on my mortgage and bracing for foreclosure proceedings to begin. Thus begins this cautionary and critical examination of the housing crisis, a story that turned personal when New York Times economics reporter Andrews got caught up in the housing bubble after falling in love with a woman and a house. Bringing in $120,000 a year in salary—most of which went to child support and alimony to his ex-wife, Andrews says he was able to get a don't ask, don't tell mortgage with the assumption that his new wife, Patty, would be able to get a job to keep them afloat, an expectation that didn't work out as planned. Because of his economics journalism background, Andrews says he should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, and he castigates himself as well as fellow borrowers, the financial industry that took advantage of them and a government that didn't put the brakes on the crisis that many economists warned about but that Alan Greenspan, the Bush administration and others ignored. This deeply personal exposé is timely and sobering in its candor. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
A fascinating meditation on the experience of the crisis from the point of view of those facing foreclosure. (David Warsh - Economic Principals )

Andrews uses his travails as a prism for viewing the forces behind the bubble. . . . Step by step, he investigates the institutions that gave him the rope with which to hang himself. (James Pressley - Bloomberg )

Andrews’s autopsy on his mortgage and the conditions that helped produce it is sharp and at times mordantly funny. (Tom Vanderbilt - The New York Times Book Review )

Provides important information on the recent mortgage debacle and the hazards of consumer debt. A must-read... (Mary Whaley - Booklist )

Read Busted for the insight. . . .The president and every member of Congress should read this book. (Michelle Singletary - The Washington Post )

Starred Review. This deeply personal exposé is timely and sobering in its candor. (Publishers Weekly )

The fact that lenders were happy to provide the money lies at the heart of Andrews' compelling book: Borrowers and lenders alike were drunk on credit and blind to the risks. (Jim Weiker - Columbus Post Dispatch )

[T]he value of this vividly written history is in the way it helps to explain how our country reached the point where about one out of 10 home mortgages is either overdue or in foreclosure. Some people blame lax regulation. Others point to loose monetary policy at the Federal Reserve and greed on Wall Street. Mr. Andrews's book makes it clear that the real culprit is human nature. (James R. Hagerty - The Wall Street Journal )

From the Back Cover
"The icy slap of reality hit me two weeks after New Year's Day in January 2005. I walked out of the Times's Washington bureau, two blocks north of the White House, and crossed Farragut Square to my bank. I had a bad feeling about what the ATM would reveal about my balance, but I was shocked when I looked at the receipt: $196. For practical purposes, we were broke."

A compendium of breathtakingly bad judgment and cynicism on the part of the brainiest people and biggest institutions in American finance, Busted is a darkly humorous, fun-house surreal, and ultimately devastating account of the mortgage crisis that triggered a global financial disaster and nearly bankrupted the author.