The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis

by Michael W. Hudson

Who killed the economy? A page-turning, true-crime exposé of the subprime salesmen and Wall Street alchemists who produced the biggest financial scandal in American history "It's hard to have a guilty conscience if you don't have a conscience. Anything that benefited production - that benefited me and benefited my wallet - I'd do it." The sales force at Ameriquest Mortgage took this philosophy to heart. They watched the Hollywood white-collar-crime flick "Boiler Room" as a training tape, studying how to pitch overpriced deals to unsuspecting home owners. They learned how to forge signatures on mortgage paperwork and create fake documents in "cut-and-paste" operations they dubbed "The Lab" or "The Art Department." In this stunning narrative, award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson reveals the story of the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage business by chronicling the rise and fall of two corporate Ameriquest and Lehman Brothers. As the biggest subprime lender and Wall Street's biggest patron of subprime, Ameriquest and Lehman did more than any other institutions to create the feeding frenzy that emboldened mortgage pros to flood the nation with high-risk, high-profit home loans. It's a tale populated by a remarkable cast of the a shadowy billionaire who created the subprime industry out of the ashes of the 1980s S&L scandal; Wall Street executives with an insatiable desire for product; struggling home owners ensnared in the most ingenious of traps; lawyers and investigators who tried to expose the fraud; politicians and bureaucrats who turned a blind eye; and, most of all, the drug-snorting, high-living salesman who tell all about the money they made, the lies they told, the deals they closed. Provocative and gripping, The Monster is a searing exposé of the bottom-feeding fraud and top-down greed that fueled the financial collapse.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Business, History, Finance, Politics, Crime

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1010

About the author

Michael W. Hudson is a Pulitzer-Prize winning American investigative journalist. He is currently on his second stint as a senior editor with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Reviews

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book. The only way that we are going to get out of the current economic crisis is for people to educate themselves about how we got into this mess: otherwise, we will keep repeating our failures. The story is incredibly complex, mainly focusing on Ameriquest Mortgage, but encompassing a massive number of other players.

The title comes from a script that Ameriquest salespeople were taught to use, where they talked people with bad credit into re-mortgaging their homes with a sales pitch that ran something like this: "The interest rate on this loan isn't your enemy. (Desperate people were offered low-interest loans that sky=rocketed in a matter of months, or sometimes even days.) Time is your enemy.At this interest rate, you can pay off more and be finished with the loan in a shorter period of time."

After talking people into signing the loan documents, the mortgage brokers would pursue a number of nefarious activities to assure the loans went through. These including whiting out income on W-2's, and replacing it with a higher number, and then xeroxing the W-2. The false copy would go into the file. People's occupations on the loan application would also be changed. Copies of documents which Ameriquest was legally obligated to give to the customers were never given, and when people asked for them, they were lied to.

This, of course, barely scratches the surface. While literally stealing thousands of peoples' homes, the company whose slogan was, "Proud Sponsor of the American Dream," was also stuffing government officials pockets with cash. Not just elected officials, but also the people who were supposed to be overseeing them.

The insensitivity and greed displayed by these lenders is almost unfathomable. There was no end to the lengths that these people would go to make a buck. Virtually every aspect of the Wall Street collapse emerges in this book. The bonus for the reader is that the author writes in a style that makes this book a page-turner. It reads like fiction, although the facts are well-documented in the massive Notes section at the end of the book.

I am a member of the Occupy movement. If you take the time to read this book and haven't already joined us, you may well consider becoming an Occupier, too.

[Thomas Ray]

Dewey 332.63240973 H868m
Library-of-Congress HG2040.5 U5 H843 2010 College Library Rm 1191

This is Michael W. Hudson (1961-),
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

NOT the much-more-prolific Michael Hudson (1939-)
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book, but it shouldn't be the only one you read about the financial crisis. This book looks at the ground-level operations of subprime lenders - Ameriquest in particular - during the late 1990s and the housing boom of the 2000s. Lenders such as Ameriquest had a boiler room mentality, pushing through as many loans as possible which where then sold to major Wall Street banks, which packaged them into mortgage-backed securities, when were then stamped with AAA ratings by the ratings agencies and sold to suckers (I mean, investors). I always thought the movie "Boiler Room" sucked and wondered who would actually like it. Turns out the answer is Ameriquest, who showed it to its employees as a model of how to behave. Employees took this to heart, guzzling Red Bull by the case (federal investigators later said they could tell how dirty an Ameriquest lending office was by the amount of empty Red Bull cans in the dumpster behind the office), altering documents such as W2s to push loans through (dubbed by some employees at the "Art Department") and using deception to get people to sign for loans with high upfront points, closing costs, and adjustable rates. It didn't matter that these loans were bad, they were sold to Wall Street, so any defaults were their problem, not Ameriquest's, and Ameriquest received generous origination fees and employees were rewarded with BMWs, booze-filled trips, and parties featuring coke and strippers (in some branch offices). Moral hazard at its finest.

This book shouldn't be the only one you read about the financial crisis because there are a lot important issues that aren't dealt with. The author doesn't explain why securitization became all the rage during the 1990s and 2000s. He alludes to "deregulation" being the culprit. But, the diisintermediation that occurred in the inflationary 1970s, which isn't mentioned, is far more important. It would be a mistake to come away thinking that deregulation is solely to blame. Also, government policy which contributed to the bubble and the misbehavior of Fannie and Freddie isn't mentioned at all. I was going to read "The Devils Are All Here" by Bethany McLean and Jose Nocera, which deals with this, next but it turns out that I didn't order it from Amazon like I thought I did, so it will have to come with my next book order. Damn! However, to understand the crisis, it is important to understand how the incentives on the ground-level made what happened possible, which is why this book is worthwhile.

The author alludes to the answer to preventing another crisis as being more regulation and consumer protection. After reading this book, I am pessimistic about this. Roland Arnall, the CEO of Ameriquest, even after Ameriquest's dirty practices were known and in the midst of an investigation into them, was still nominated and confirmed as the Ambassador to the Netherlands. It's not like the vote was particularly close (a unanimous voice vote in the Senate). Deval Patrick, a former Ameriquest board member who made hundreds of thousands from the company, later became governor of Massachusetts. The author rightly comes down hard on Patrick in the book. A aspect of financial reform that made the Dodd-Frank that was mentioned briefly but favorably was a consumer protection commission to prevent these type of subprime loans from being made. I find this idea to be a non-starter. Does anyone actually think any commission would have cut-off subprime lending during the height of the bubble? For example, the Fed has a poor track record of taking away the punch bowl before the party gets really good.

The best way to prevent moral hazard is to go back to "old school" lending where banks loan the mortgage and then hold the mortgage for the duration. Hence, the incentive is to make good loans as the lending bank is stuck with the bad ones rather than selling them off to a sucker. But, this of course means that fewer mortgages are made, which conflicts with the government's goal of maximizing the home ownership rate (who decided that the American dream means owning a home anyway?). If the government insists on resurrecting the securitzation market, which it seems hell-bent on doing, then it should consider the idea of assignee-liability, which is discussed in the book. This means that mortgage originators are held liable for bad loans they originate. Of course, the mortgage industry hates it and managed to get it repealed in Georgia, so I wouldn't hold my breath. I think I'd also ban credit default swaps, or at least make originators of them back them with a capital ratio of 100%. There's probably other stuff I'd do too, but this review has gone on long enough.

Yeah, so this is a long review, but this is an interesting and important topic. Plus, Michigan State lost a big basketball game today, so writing this review is better than thinking about the game :o)

P.S. Despite what the book alludes too, those of us in favor of "free markets" DO believe that enforcing rules against fraud is a legitimate role of government. Also, one wonders after reading this and Michael Lewis' book how many of the mortgage-backed securities that were issued are really worthless. This would have some bad implications for the banking sector and the Fed (which has a lot of them on its balance sheet).

[Evan Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know more about the subprime mortgage crash of the late 2000’s or the predatory lending practices that forged it’s path, this is a fascinating and very human study of the intricacies that go into massive scale fraud and why it’s so difficult to combat it at a government level. Michael Hudson is one of the best minds in investigative journalism and his account gives a look into not only the “how,” but the “why” behind the morally corrupt tactics and the people that spurred an economic disaster.

[Vishal Kale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael W Hudson is a staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity, and has also written for the Wall Street Journal. The subject of the book is a true expose of the Subprime Causes - told in breathtaking forceful detail, told at the street level, with customer names, sales managers' names, companies strategies. That is perhaps biggest punch of this book - almost every chapter has interleaved stories of real people, and how they were taken in by the unethical sales practices they were exposed to...The book deals extensively with customer stories, vividly told in painstaking detail, stories that highlight how unsuspecting and trusting customers were taken in by the unethical and sometime downright illegal practices that were adopted by the staff of the companies. That approach elevates the book from one that is a study of why the crisis occurred; instead the book becomes one that offers a human side to the story, and enables the reader to remain connected with the ground realities. This refreshing approach also offers relief from the constant investigations, strategems, growth and fall of the subprime lenders which form the meat of the book.

For that is precisely the main theme of the book: The rise, sustenance and fall of the subprime lenders. Here you will understand in detail specifically what a subprime loan is, who is a subprime customer and did this industry bring about the downfall of the world markets. The story starts with the Saving and Loan industry in the USA, and focusses on Ameriquest Mortgage and its rise and fall... as you can see in the ads given in its heydeys, the settlement it had to offer customers after the crash and the LA Times article - links below (Links provided so that Indian readers, who might never have heard of Ameriquest, can get a feel of the company in the ads, the wikipedia article, the settlement website and the LA Times article; also, on seeing the ads the story becomes less bookish as you establish a connection with the central company of the book)

Read More : https://reflectionsvvk.blogspot.in/20...

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not now of most of these details before reading the book. I knew of mortgages with interest rates that blew up after three years and about liar loans etc. I knew that banks were forced to make loans to people not qualified because to use objective criteria was called racist. So when I heard the phrase "predatory loans" I rolled my eyes. The problem with people crying racism or predatory behavior all the time is that when in happens it does not register.

Michael Hudson, as usual, gets into details. It turned my stomach. The book provides details of how homeowners were conned into refinancing their homes and ended up homeless. Black older single women were the preferred targets. The book title is from the potent, illegal sales phase used to close the deals.

I do not expect any political party to seriously these issues. The Dems pretend to care and the GOP does not even pretend. I had hoped that Obama would throw banksters in jail like after the savings and loan frauds but it never happened. The last Dem and GOP conventions were held at arenas named after financial institutions. Read Bailout (Barofsky) or Chain of Title (2016) to further raise your blood pressure.

[Amit Jain · Rating 4 out of 5]

In reference to books on subprime meltdown and its subsequent catastrophic impact on global economy, that I have read till date specifically Michael Lewis "The big short - inside the doomsday machine" focussed more on the complex financial toxic instruments devised /packaged and sold by the Wall Street players to the world, whereas this book focusses more on the high pressure sales "boiler room" strategies adopted by the front end players and the fraud they indulged in befooling the naive loan borrowers...this book is the other side of story and makes the reader understand the crisis holistically and also is grim reminder of our current status of governance mechanism, which sides with the few powerful but leaves the common man to the mercy of these powerful...

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was hard to read at some points, it's so painful. You know what's going to happen at the end, and for over 20 years, you watch an army of fraudsters grow - from twenty-something kids who want Escalades to middle mangers who want a million, to one executive to becomes the ambassador to the Netherlands, thousands of people turn their backs on their fellow man for a quick buck. Every single one of these people knew, on some level, that what they were doing was wrong, and they did not care enough to stop. Moreover, the book reveals how the system was deliberately built, and the only design flaw was the blind hubris that there would be an infinite pile of victims, an infinite well of money to draw on. Excellent and heart-breaking.

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay. Trying to read books about the collapse of America is hard asthis book to me weeks to finish this book. It read kind of like a suspense novel? So many characters and subplots. It saddens me to know the reach of corporate power once established and wary of any individuals that CLAIM they "are just trying to help you get a better rate". The national banks and lending companies shown in the book are now dead to me (if they can be). In the future, when I hopefully purchase a house, I am reading every fucking document.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very entertaining and educating read. I don't know a lot about economy, but this book allows an almost casual access to the topic.
An insider might be annoyed by the repetition of names he already read several times, but for me it was good to be assured that I got the connections right and the (vast) amount of people mentioned was less confusing than it could have been.

[Charles Blumberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important read for understanding the predatory lending to subprime borrowers by FAMCO and Ameriquest, backed by Lehman Brothers that led to the 2008 financial meltdown. Documents the strategy of enticing the poor and elderly into loans with large origination loan fees and higher interest rates, and how the sales staff changed documentation in order for loans to be accepted.

[jennifer]

fantastic and heartbreaking. (though i mayyyy be predisposed to a book that stars prescient consumer rights lawyers, and presents the fight against predatory lending through the 90s and early 2000s as harbinger of everything that would emerge as deeply wrong with our housing markets...)

[Jeremy Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read; less in depth on the psychology of the participants than I was hoping for, but a very detailed look at the step by step process that kept fueling the subprime business.

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

For someone who doesn't really understand banks or mortgages, this book was easy to understand and follow. Incredibly thorough and illuminating look at the crisis.

[Elf M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael W. Hudson's book The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis has left me scared and paranoid. Every time the phone rings and I don't recognize the phone number, I start to sweat profusely. Is it... one of them?

Unfortunately, Hudson's book isn't a Stephen King (or even Stephen Coontz) work of fiction. It is horror, but it's not fiction. It's an investigation into the way mortgage-backed securitization, the mainstreaming of home equity lending, and a look-the-other-way regulatory regime, all combined into a perfect shit storm to wreck the American economy and destroy the middle class.

While the book concentrates on a few characters, the centerpiece being the late Roland Arnall, CEO of Ameriquest, its real villain is the root of all evil, money. In their quest for it, Ameriquest, First American Mortgage, and other mortgage brokers first reframed the once disreputable second mortgage, something you only took out if you were in desperate and dire straits, into the pleasant-seeming and even fair "home equity loan" or "home equity line of credit."

Although, as JP Morgan now admits, not only did incomes not grow during the Bush administration, but corporate accounts grew only because wages and benefits for the middle class were squeezed, we still bought cars and houses. How? With those equity lines of credit. With money we didn't have.

The Monster shows that not only was America's growth during the Bush Administration illusory, it was fraudulent. While salesmen with thousands of calls sold to people barely familiar with their first mortgage, much less their second, they were also doctoring the images, timing meetings to make sure customers were ill-prepared and time-pressured to just sign it all without reading it, and sometimes aggressively pressuring people to just sign. Back at "the lab," (a nickname some Ameriquest offices had for the office's copy room, where Wite-Out and scissors were used to creative effect), the loan paperwork would be doctored to reflect higher percentage rates, balloon fees, and other nightmares. Sometimes signers were given huge stacks to sign, not knowing that they were signing two mortgages, one of which was to be thrown out.

The entire disaster was a Ponzi scheme in which securitization (the conversion of bundles of mortgages into market-tradeable entities) fed huge funds into the system, and then groaning mortgages and other debts extracted huge funds from the wallets of ordinary citizens. When the music stopped, there were a lot of chairs missing, and a lot of people fell down. The current wave of foreclosures is not just because people lost their jobs in the disaster; it's because they lost their jobs after 10 million of them mistakenly bought mortgages they did not understand and did not appreciate were worse than their current mortgage.

The title of the book comes from a missing chapter in the First American Mortgage Co's sales manual. There were seven chapters, which had all kinds of psychological tricks for getting a customer to sign. (The most "cute" of which was that a salesman would always introduce himself three times-- once in the lobby of the sales office, then again after another person had lead the mark to his office, and a third time, after he had left the office on a contrived errand and returned. The idea was that the mark, having now "met" this salesman three times, was no longer convinced the he was a stranger but an acquaintance and possibly a friend.) "The Monster" was the secret chapter eight, a word-of-mouth only class-- sales trainees were forbidden from taken notes-- in which an old hand taught the sales trainees how to make a higher mortgage, with higher points and fees, look better than the mark's current mortgage. "Press the mark to hear the initial payment, make them ignore the refinancing fees, adjustable rate, or ballon payment, steer them clear, always say 'you hear their concerns' or 'that won't be a problem,' then steer them back to hearing the initial payment rate. Show them how a shorter-term mortgage will 'save them money' while making you rich."

Another mortgage company's president described his company's "LTV 80/20" as "the mortgage equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction." An LTV is the Loan-To-Value, that is, the ratio of the initial loan versus what the bank expects the value of the house to be when the loan ends. An LTV higher than 65% is generally considered a poor loan. The 80/20 loan was two mortgages issued simultaneously through two separate shell mortgage companies, for a total LTV of 100%! All of these companies had LTV loans in the 70%-85% range. These guys knew what they were selling.

And if he thought that was a weapon of mass destruction, I have to wonder what he thought of the third-party collateralized debt obligations and other "synthetic securitization" packages.

Hudson is a reporter, and he doesn't flinch at showing how many villains there were. The Federal Trade Commission comes in for a particular bashing as, in 2004, commissioners said "If there were any problems [in the mortgage industry], we would have heard about them," when in fact an average of 400 complaints a month were hitting their office. He shows how ACORN, that bugaboo of the right, was suborned by Ameriquest with supporting money into "looking the other way" as Ameriquest rampaged through poorly-educated minority neighborhoods in a deliberate and systematic way.

The Monster is a horror, but it's the reality in which we live. It's a picture of how one section of the financial industry blew up its alchemical laboratory, hid America's deeper flaws until it was too late, and transferred wealth up to Lehman Brothers, the biggest bank involved in sub-prime securitization. It shows how a well-educated, well-trained, motivated, unregulated, conscience-free industry set out to make money without limits, and in the process destroyed a once great nation.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more I read about the financial crisis the more I still can’t believe it happened. But also I can. So much greed. Housing as a commodity and the financialization of our economy lead to the most depraved rent-seeking behavior by mortgage companies, investment banks and politicians who gladly looked the other way. Absurd to try and blame homeowners and individuals who were abused, lied to and taken advantage of to make a buck. Pretty cool that we bailed out companies/banks and not former homeowners who got evicted.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An in-depth and well researched book about the origins of sub-prime lending and to a lesser extent, it's effect on the economy. It primarily focuses on the lenders themselves, but I would have liked to see the Wall St. connection explored a little further. It ends with barely a nod to the 2008 housing collapse. It seems the author ran out of time before he could explore the contagion that spread after the foreclosure wave 0f 2008 on.

[Book Shark · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America - and Spawned a Global Crisis by Michael W. Hudson

"The Monster..." is the page-turning expose of the subprime mortgage business. Award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson narrates a fascinating web of deception that was infuriatingly targeted against the most vulnerable of our society. It describes the scoundrels and their methods. This 384-page book is composed of the following fifteen chapters: 1. Godfather, 2. Golden State, 3. Purge, 4. Kill the Enemy, 5. The Big Spin, 6. The Track, 7. Buried, 8. Boil, 9. The Battle for Georgia, 10. The Trail, 11. Feeding the Monster, 12. Chimera, 13. The Investigators, 14. The Big Game, and 15.Collapse.

Positives:
1. A top-notch book that is well-researched and well-written.
2. An accessible book for the masses. It's not a technical book, the stories, narrations drives this book.
3. Reads like a very good novel in which the criminals and victims lives are intertwined by events. The characters and their roles comes to light.
4. This book totally changed my perception of how predatory lending went down. Fascinating and upsetting at the same time.
5. Predatory business model illustrated.
6. Wall Street's main villain, Lehman. Their role and impact.
7. The subprime abuses of Roland Arnall of Ameriquest.
8. The impact of politics in the deregulatory business.
9. The essence of the subprime business explained. Educational indeed.
10. Mr. Hudson makes it fairly clear, first of all, predatory lending was a crime that was perpetuated against the most vulnerable of our society. Secondly, it was mainly refinancing loans. In other words, they targeted the elderly and minorities who already owned homes and had enough equity to make the crime work. Sickening!
11. The book contains so many interesting and sad stories of victims of predatory loans.
12. Predatory lending was not just limited to loans with bad terms but outright fraud to get the approval of said loans in the first place. The book relays how one manager figured that $75 million out of the $90 million in mortgages he sold contained some sort of "material fraud".
13. Prudential's role in the subprime business.
14. The role of "securitization" in the subprime business.
15. Thought-provoking quotes, "If you don't believe in the product you're selling, he thought, you're just a con artist".
16. The stories of the rise and fall of many subprime institutions: FAMCO, Keystone to name a few.
17. The Federal Trade Commission was the only federal agency that showed concern about mortgage lending abuses.
18. The fascinating inside look at the investigations of predatory lenders and the outcomes.
19. The realization that in the banking industry, crime may in fact pay...
20. Fascinating facts throughout book. The dollar amounts are mind-blowing.
21. The fact that the lenders portrayed in the book seldom lowered people's rates and almost always put them in worse positions.
22. The rise and fall of Alan Greenspan.
23. Mr. Hudson makes the compelling argument backed by strong examples that the main blame of the subprime crisis falls on Wall Street and the institutions that designed the evil schemes that defrauded millions of borrowers.
24. How the subprime predatory practices impacted us all.
25. The main culprits of the subprime mortgage catastrophe.
26. How Richard Fuld and other top executives of Lehman represented the predatory lending fraud and paid themselves handsomely while their companies deteriorated.
27. A where are they now closing chapter that neatly ties everything up at the end.
28. An interesting read throughout.

Negatives:
1. Notes are not linked!
2. With so many players involved, it's easy to get lost at times.
3. Charts or illustrations would have added value.
4. I would have liked a little more on CRA and the political blame game.

In summary, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It provided much needed education on this important topic of subprime mortgages and in doing so changed my perception on who was mainly to blame. A very accessible and enlightening book, I highly recommend it!

Further suggestions: "Perfectly Legal..." by David Cay Johnston, "War on the Middle Class..." by Lou Dobbs, "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class" by Thom Hartmann, "The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy" by Joshua Holland, and "The Looting of America..." by Les Leopold.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

With regard to books on the sub-prime meltdown of 2008 and the damage it did to the American and global economy, I have previously read and reviewed Michael Lewis' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Lewis' book focused on the details and nature of the complex financial instruments being traded by high-level financial executives on Wall Street, and a small set of amoral entrepreneurs who clearly saw the coming disaster and took advantage of it to line their own pockets.

Michael Hudson, in The Monster, focuses instead on the predatory lenders who built empires selling the sub-prime mortgages themselves, the CEOs of companies like Ameriquest and FAMCO, and to a lesser extent the bond traders on Wall Street who backed the fraudsters, Lehman Brothers in particular. Not surprisingly, one learns that the CEOs and managers of predatory lending companies are assholes to a man, boiler room operators who relentlessly flogged their salesmen to produce more and yet more, cold-hearted greedheads who would fleece impoverished grandmothers on Social Security and think nothing of it. When it comes to the deep-pocketed bond traders like Lehman Brothers, Hudson shows that it was always perfectly clear to them what sort of crooked operators they were crawling into bed with; again, no one gave a shit about anything but money.

Hudson also describes the innumerable investigations of sub-prime mortgage lenders and their Wall Street backers that were mounted around the country, some successful in getting small settlements for naive borrowers who had their homes taken from them, most not.

The Monster is quite readable, and easier to understand than The Big Short. It's a depressing story, and one suspects little has changed in the wake of the sub-prime debacle.

[Carl R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Monster by Michael W. Hudson we have, despite the fact that it’s a careful
ly researched piece of nonfiction, a true novel of corporate and political crime, crime that reaches to the highest and lowest levels. The book wins the Writer Working award for the longest and best subtitle of this or any other year [How a gang of predatory lenders and Wall Street bankers fleeced America--and spawned a global crisis.] The add-on was a great idea because the title tells nothing of what the book is really about, and you don’t find out what it means until halfway through. All this is fine with me, because once you know the answer it was worth the wait, and the subtitle sums things up nicely.

This book will angrify you and raise your blood pressure, but I still encourage you to read it. Once you have, you’ll know that it’s not just the naive and greedy people who signed up for loans they could never pay back; not just the thug frauds who designed, misrepresented, and sold the loans; not just Wall Street and the bankers; not just the politicians; not just the president. It was all of them, and we’re paying while they play. Grrr.

[Nathan Willard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hudson's book details the history of subprime lending in the United States, shows how deception played a key role in its boom years, and examines the ways in which major subprime players used their cash to extend their companies' existence for just long enough to get their cash out (before bankrupting the companies and walking away). It puts the lie to the "profligate borrower" narrative of the financial crisis and the idea that the mortgage volume done by the major subprime lenders could have been done legitimately. The best work, I thought, was Hudson's clear explanation of how and why major investment and commercial banks came to own the more shadowy subprime lenders. That part of the story was glossed over in House of Cards, Too Big to Fail and Fool's Gold, and so The Monster helps to fill in the gaps that got us from the beginning to the end of the history. The book does get a little thin at times and doesn't have quite the compelling narrative arc as some of the other crisis books, but part of that is the naked outrageousness of the environments he's detailing.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael W. Hudson spent the better part of two decades researching this book on Ameriquest and the subprime mortgage crisis and his effort shows, with an in depth understanding of the practices of these predatory lenders and the systemic breakdowns that allowed them to operate.

Paired with stories of victims, this forms a disturbing whole that will have you double checking your own agreement just to make sure you haven't been swindled like these borrowers were.

If you want to understand how the banking crisis began and how subprime lending and Wall Street interacted to keep state and federal officials off of their backs, this is well worth reading. Just be prepared to be infuriated as you are educated.

[Jeremy Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I liked most about this book was how it helped put things in perspective- what really caused the 2008 recession and what illegal activities and irresponsible actions lead to so much suffering. Now that people are occupying Wall Street and so many people are unhappy with the government and economic system in the US, this book has taken on a new sense of relevance.
Written in simple language, one doesn't need to be a business or legal person to understand what the author is saying. I half expect to hear about this being required reading for a college history or business course because there is so much going on that gives the reader pause for thought and consider the issues presented in this book in context to conflicts currently occuring. I also half expect to see this book on the "list of banned books" next year.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I confess, I am writing this review before finishing the book because I'm not entirely sure that I need to. The core of this book is informative and horrifying, and has instilled even more paranoia in me about signing any kind of loan or contract ever again. However, the book is repetitive and often the strength of the book (focusing on the stories of the individuals who perpetrated and were victimized by predatory lending) is also it's downfall: frankly, I am tired of reading two page vignettes about seemingly every person Hudson ever interviewed. I want more narrative. As another reviewer stated, this book should have been about 150 pages shorter. And it's only about 350 anyway.

[The Book : An Online Review at The New Republic]

ON A RAINY NOVEMBER morning in 1990, an eighty-nine-year-old widower from Burbank, California named Anthony Elliott, after discovering that he had lost his life savings, climbed into his bathtub and slit his wrists with a straight razor. Three days earlier, on Thanksgiving Day, he had typed a suicide note. It read: “There is nothing left for me ... My government is supposed to serve and protect, but who? Those who can gather the most savings from retired people.” Read more...

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting picture of how the big banks came to have all the subprime mortgages that caused the crisis of 2008. This book has good storytelling and good journalism. However, one its strengths is also its weakness: the many short anecdotes about different colorful characters. These stories keep things fresh, but it is hard to keep all the different people straight and know if they will show up again. Other than that, this is a great picture of the factors that resulted in a global meltdown.

[Troy Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, fantastic book...takes a different perspective from the voluminous selection of books available on the economic crisis. Exactly what I was looking for, "The Monster" focuses on the ground level of the subprime crisis - the subprime mortgage lenders, the "Cowboy Capitalist" mortgage brokers, and how the Wall Street firms became enablers of worst practices in the retail mortgage approval process.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating story of the subprime mortgage debacle. The author follows one of the main players, owner of several companies that targeted homeowners to become a billionare starting in the 90's. It's hard to believe that what these companies did was legal but until the bottom fell out of the market in 2007 they were able to perpetuate a pyramid scheme in conjunction with wall street.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eye-opening indictment of predatory lending and the corporate greed that served as the engine for our Great Recession. While I enjoyed the book, and while it proved its' case magnificently, I can't help but feel that this should have been a long essay rather than a 302 page book.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sub prime mortgage mess was way worse than you can imagine. It wrecked innocent people's lives and did spawn the global economic crisis. The book tended to be repetitive at times, but certainly raised my understanding of this issue.