The Sellout
By Charles Gasparino
HarperBusiness, 576 pp., $28
At the opposite end of the literary spectrum is Charles Gasparino's The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System, a colorful journalistic account of the meltdown from inside Wall Street's most vulnerable investment banks, particularly the late (and not universally lamented) Bear Stearns. In the author's vivid portrait, these institutions come across as bastions of ego, greed and testosterone.
Whereas This Time Is Different spans centuries, The Sellout usefully goes back only as far as the 1980s to reveal the roots of the Street's obsession with lucrative mortgage securities, credit default swaps and other such explosive innovations. Like Reinhart and Rogoff, Gasparino (in retrospect) sees ample warning signs in advance of the collapse.
NEXT: The philosophy of financial regulation
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