The financial crisis that has gripped this country since last September has had so many twists and turns, it would make for a great drama -- if it all were not so real and damaging. Companies are shutting down and laying off workers, 401ks are melting away, and the government is spending $700 billion dollars to bail out banks and financial institutions -- and that's only the beginning. The financial services industry, and the many industries that depend on it -- from housing to cars -- is in intensive care.
So what happened? How did we get to this point of financial disaster? Is the economy just a huge, Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme? It is a complicated and confusing story -- but Daniel Gross of Newsweek has a special gift for making complicated matters easy to understand and even entertaining. In Dumb Money, he offers a guide to the debacle and to what the future may hold. This is not so much a book about who did what, though that's part of the story. Rather, it pieces together the building blocks of the debt-fueled economy, and distills the theory and personalities behind our late, lamented easy money culture. Dumb Money is a book that finally lays it all out in an engaging way, and might just help people invest their money smartly until the gloom passes.
Download and start listening now!
"Interesting and informative but a better book on the same subject with mug more information an history is -"the quants" however both books have slight bias running inopposite direction so read both lol "
— Johann (4 out of 5 stars)
“Mr. Gross gives the lay reader a succinct, breezy, and sometimes snarky account of how ‘the Ownership Society’ so quickly devolved ‘into Bailout Nation,’”
— New York Times" Interesting and informative but a better book on the same subject with mug more information an history is -"the quants" however both books have slight bias running inopposite direction so read both lol "
— Johann, 3/5/2012" Every stock "trader" should read this book. Though I've never been a day trader, I personally think day trading is a fool's game. This is a book about a fool's lifestyle. "
— Chad, 3/4/2011" A look at the housing bubble and the recession that followed. It broke down how the cheap money led to some dumb money and then dumber money. Very interesting ideas. "
— Laura, 2/21/2011
Daniel Gross is the economics editor and a columnist at Yahoo! Finance. He was a senior editor at Newsweek, where he wrote the Contrary Indicator column, also writing a twice-weekly Moneybox column for Slate and the Economic View column in the New York Times. He has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, News Hour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN, and on more than thirty-five radio programs, including NPR’s Fresh Air. He lives in Connecticut.