Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

140 of 148 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I thought it would take at least a decade for a book this good, November 16, 2010

By

Aaron C. Brown (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (Hardcover)

I thought it would take a couple of decades of perspective to tell the full story of the crisis. Meanwhile Michael Hirsh's Capital Offense (which covered the story from Washington), along with The Big Short by Michael Lewis (focusing on a few offbeat portfolio managers), Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market (which went deep into intellectual history and gave testimony from many of the people who invented the theories), The Quants by Scott Patterson (working from the equations out) and Glenn Yago and Franklin Allen's Financing the Future (which traced the story from prehistory into the future and emphasized the positive side of financial innovation as much as the negative side) were the best available accounts. All had stylish writing, great stories and thorough research to cover important aspects of events.

Without taking anything away from any of those books, All the Devils are Here manages to cover every important financial aspect of the crisis. To be fair, it doesn't go into as much history or theory as Justin Fox, Michael Hirsh or Yago and Allen did, and it's not as great a story as Michael Lewis and Scott Patterson extracted. It covers the crisis and only the crisis and is too detailed to be as much fun as Lewis and Patterson.

You won't find gigantic surprises in this book, the usual suspects are examined: originate-to-sell, government-sponsored entities, political pressure to increase homeownership and provide jobs and perks for politicians and their friends, rating agencies, mathematical models divorced from commonsense and reality, CEO's remote from their businesses, and all sorts of people chasing profits and supressing doubts. What this account adds is nuance and balance. Different things mattered at different times, and in most cases there were at least some positive aspects. Things that everyone agrees were bad usually turn out to be bad in this account, but often in slightly different ways than is commonly assumed. Not all doubts were supressed, and a comforting number of people acted with honor and wisdom rather than short-term focus on profits or votes (not a decisive number, unfortunately, but comforting compared to popular conception).

If you read one book to understand the crisis, I recommend this one. Your understanding will be much deeper if you read all the ones above, and those might be better choices if you're interested in the crisis in some larger context, like the history of finance or political decision-making. But this is an amazing accomplishment, to distill this complete and even-handed a story while the fallout is still falling and few participants have had a chance to reflect on events and add perspective. No doubt there will be better histories in the future, but I'll bet the authors will all start by reading this one.