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Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles R Morris
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Category: Book
List Price: £13.99
Buy New: £8.90
You Save: £5.09 (36%)
New (21) Used (7) Collectible (1) from £5.99
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 3708
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9
ISBN: 1586485636
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.04150973
EAN: 9781586485634
ASIN: 1586485636
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW - ***Delivery usually * 4 - 5 * working days - From Aphrohead of SOUTHPORT, Lancs, UK *** . Priority Airmail used Worldwide on International orders. Thanks from all at Aphrohead.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
some good bits January 8, 2009
MrB (Newmarket, Suffolk, UK)
It confirms what I suspected: hedge funds and banks are interdependent, and each others' customers. The whole thing, in fact, is a gigantic Ponzi scheme, with them all selling (the same thing)to themselves so they can get bonuses and commissions.
Ok, so the author doesn't explain every concept in detail, but then you can go further with other reading if you really want to get technical. But it was all caused by much more than just sub prime.
 Fine study of this great crash December 16, 2008
William Podmore (London United Kingdom)
Charles Morris, an American writer, lawyer and former banker, has written a useful account of the long-building credit crash.
The last three decades saw the most reckless speculation ever, and the greatest global real estate bubble. By 2005, global financial assets - stocks, bonds, loans and mortgages - were worth four times global GDP. Financial derivatives - a form of claim on these financial assets - had a notional value of ten times global GDP, about $500 trillion.
Morris warns that the write-downs and defaults will take a trillion dollars, but due to capitalism's chaotic nature could cost two or three times more. The crash is in every kind of financial asset: there are no firebreaks. Thatcherism's free-market mania for asset stripping, abusive lending, and hedge fund secrecy has ended in ruin.
The USA's accumulated deficit between 2000 and 2006 was $4 trillion, funded by foreign countries, companies and banks. So now all the surplus nations - Russia, China, Japan, the Middle East countries - are moving away from the dollar and, like the pound, it is now in freefall, causing what the Economist called 'the biggest default in history'.
The US and British governments are turning a debacle into a decades-long disaster, backing their financial capitalists and covering up their problems (hedge funds, like tax havens, do not disclose their balance sheets). Likewise, when Japan's credit and property bubbles burst in the early 1990s, its ruling class defended Japan's financial capitalists, producing a slump that has not yet ended.
Morris urges a bigger public health care sector and a re-regulation of finance, which would be a start. He concludes, "market dogmatism .. has become the problem, rather than the solution." And he urges us to end what Adam Smith called "the disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful - the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
Prescient and a great read December 10, 2008
Bangkok viewer
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read this shortly after it was published before many of the events in the current financial & economic crisis unfolded. Over the past few months I have seen its reasoning and predictions born out many times. There are still other predictions which only the future will prove one way or the other but having seemed more fanciful at the time of writing to many mainstream analysts now seem anything but. This is the best book I have read on the credit crisis and, whilst I have some background in finance, unlike a previous viewer I didn't think that it overwhelmed with terminology - I thought it explained complex finance in a very readable manner. I was originally a bit suspicious about a finance book written by a lawyer but I have to concede that this is an impressive account.
Once you've read this, if you haven't read it already and are interested for more, JK Galbraith's account of the Wall Street Crash of the 1930's is great reading and very relevant today.
 Undefined jargon by the shedload November 28, 2008
G. Turner (Sheffield UK)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
After a very good start (first 2 chapters) in which the author summarizes the development of US economics from 1900 to the Reagan-Thatcher era, the book rapidly deteriorates into a jargon packed text. Some of it may be US English, but is still unintelligible to the layperson e.g. quants, barbelled, scarfing up, total positions to equity, work off positions, leveraged buyout deals,bought the call, buy a put, megaportfolio asset management, arbitrageurs swoop, roiled bond, counterparty surveillance, and so it goes on. Few of these terms are defined or explained. This may be fine for someone who understands the jargon, but then why bother buying the book in the first place?
Very good coverage of the basics. August 27, 2008
Too many books
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
If you are buying any other books, or reading any other articles on the recent "credit crunch", you should seriously consider getting this book too. The writer is a lawyer, and in very precise plain clear language, describes how each of the new types of financial instrument, from "put" to "synthetic collateralized debt obligation", works, covering why people originally developed them, and how people have gone on to use and enhance them. It then covers all the risks that have developed as a result of their use in practice, and briefly covers the overall financial consequences, as far as people understand them. This includes talking about various regulatory failures that have contributed to the crisis.
He then makes an overall estimate of the kinds of losses that are likely. Although the real losses are looking even more serious now, several months later, he gives figures and estimates in his reasoning that enable you to get some kind of overall picture of the problems. His focus is almost entirely on the United States, but the financial instruments used elsewhere are the same, and the regulatory failures similar.
If you are reading other accounts of the developing crisis, this is a very good place to get the basic technical information on what everyone is talking about. Some books leap into explanations, with only very brief, and sometimes misunderstood, accounts of the financial instruments involved. Even if you disagree with some of Morris's points of view or conclusions, his clear account of how each financial instrument works is still very helpful.
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