*Too Big to Save*, by Robert Pozen

For the last two years I've been receiving requests — email and otherwise — for a readable, educating book on the financial crisis.  And while various books on the crisis have had their merits, no one of them has fit that bill.  Until now.

Robert Pozen's Too Big to Save: How to Fix the U.S. Financial System is the single best source for figuring out what happened.  It is the go-to book if you are a non-specialist and want to understand: how credit default swaps work, the significance of Basel II, mark-to-market, how the various Fed bailouts operated, the meaning of the toxic asset plans, and many other matters.

This is not so much a presentation of a macro narrative on the crisis as an education manual on the moving parts.  Its value stands above and beyond any particular partisan view.  Pozen, by the way, offers policy recommendations at the rough rate of about one a page and most of them are quite micro.  Even if I do not agree with everything he says, his proposals are unfailingly reasonable and well-argued and grounded in fact in some manner.

You can pre-order the book here

Here is my previous post on the book.

By the way, Pozen does refer to blogs and he even cites blog posts.

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