Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover

by Katrina Vanden Heuvel

America's economy is in meltdown. Banks have failed, foreclosures are sweeping the housing market, and stocks have suffered their worst losses since the Great Depression. Faced with a complex and spiraling crisis, the government has poured billions of taxpayer cash into a bailout with no end in sight.
At every step of the way, The Nation , America's oldest weekly magazine, has tackled the most urgent questions facing the nation's leaders and its citizens with clarity and insight. Meltdown draws together nearly twenty years of the best of their coverage of the financial crisis and explores what steps President Obama and his new administration must take to ensure a more secure future for everyone.

Contributors
William Greider on Alan Greenspan's flawed ideology
Robert Sherrill on why the bubble popped
Thomas Frank on the rise of market populism
Christopher Hayes on the coming foreclosure tsunami
Barbara Ehrenreich on the implosion of capitalism
Kai Wright on how the subprime crisis is bankrupting black America
Naomi Klein on Bush's final pillage
Joseph E. Stiglitz on Henry Paulson's shell game
Jesse Jackson on trickle-down economics
Katrina vanden Heuvel and Eric Schlosser on why America needs a New Deal

Genres: Politics, Economics, History

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2009

About the author

Dutch-American liberal Journalist and co-owner of the leftwing magazine "The Nation"

Vandenheuvel is married to the Soviet Union expert Stephen Cohen.

She received an Planned Parenthood reward for an article on feminism in the Soviet Union and was an editor of a Russian based feminist magazine.

Vandenheuvel is also an blogger on the Huffington Post.

Reviews

[Ben Krutko · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was alright. It stated it's points well, made rational and reasonable arguments. Some of the articles were quite superb, bringing information and emotional depth to otherwise staid economic issues. But the book flounders in its back half. There's a lot of sound, and very little fury. It repeats the same article several times, with basically no new additions. It's ending section seems rushed off and dispassionate.

In general, a sufficient summary of the financial crisis up to the inauguration, but quickly dated, didactic, and generalized.

[Joyceling]

Mesmerizing collection of articles from The Nation from the '90s up to December 1, 2008. Enraged and disgusted at abandonment of regulation by both parties, plus the allowance of predatory lending, etc. Have serious reservations about Geithner at Treasury.

[Alton Motobu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Series of articles from 1994 to 2008 from The Nation magazine tracing the causes of the 2008-09 Great Recession from the liberal-progressive-left-wing perspective. The seeds were planted during the Reagan administration, nurtured by Alan Greenspan during his tenure as Fed chair, not checked or pruned by Clinton, then grew out of control and exploded under George W. Bush. Republican mantras like deregulation, free markets, and self-policing all contributed to the toxicity. Democrats seemed complacent or compliant. FDR would have been ashamed that all of his New Deal efforts were being neutralized or dismantled by the Republicans. I will attempt to tackle a book from the conservative-Republican-right-wing side and compare findings.