- ISBN13: 9781594202506
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
This myth shattering book reveals the methods Nouriel Roubini used to foretell the current crisis before other economists saw it coming and shows how those methods can help us make sense of the present and prepare for the future.
Renowned economist Nouriel Roubini electrified his profession and the larger financial community by predicting the current crisis well in advance of anyone else. Unlike most in his profession who treat economic disasters as… More >>
If you normally are apprehensive about reading a book written by academics, this effort will reinforce that fear. There is nothing important or enlightening in this book. The penultimate paragraph on page 301 sums it up: “making free markets function better…requires more, not less, government.” Just what you would expect from professors who don’t work in the free market, create jobs or create wealth. Read something else. Don’t waste your time with this book.
Rating: 2 / 5
Can I make it five and a half?
In order to begin describing the book Crisis Economics, I have to turn this review into a a rhyme…
This book is so intense, it will make your mind tense, but blood boil in ecstasy as you learn more and more
About the world of economics and what’s going on in the
Well, I don’t want to repeat myself
Keynes, Austrian economics, Milton Freudman, Marx, Adam Smith, and Mills are just a few of the economists so eloquently
described
Did I say “eloquence?” Yes this book is all that and more
It’s about as simple as you could expect an economics book to be
I just go crazy rummaging through pages
I don’t know why, I just can’t stop
My passion for economics takes over and the passion of the authors’ combine, to form an unstoppable force
That can’t be stopped until I finish reading
This crazily well put together book
There’s so much material, I can’t possibly contain within a review for Amazon
So as I described how well the writing is metaphorically
I am now going to show how great and vast the scope of this material is literally…
Obama stimulus package, good or bad?
Of course, it might take a while to exactly know for a fact
However, this book provides plenty of analysis that’s almost like an investigation
To shade some light on that
The book is Kensyan in nature
They make such a convincing argument, that I had to change my previous Austrian opinion on solving the crisis
What are the Keynes’ “animal spririts” of capitalism?
Order this book to find out
Why is history so important in economics important to its studies?
Order this book to find out
How about, are economics crises’ the effect of a few bad apples?
Learn about “financial innovations” like Ginnie Mae
Oh and did I mention the Great Depression?
Greenspan, you heard of that guy!
Shadow banks, you don’t see them
A world awash in cash
Levearging, “oh no, don’t fall down”
Actually, it’s all about hedge borrrowers, speculators and Ponzis
Finally, the chapter, “things fall apart”
Walter Baghehot, again, who?
He anticipated the first failures of 2007
The entire financial system was one “terra incognita”
All intertwined
…”We are in a minefield. No one knows where mines are planted.”
An economist of the failed Lehman Brothers observed in 2007
How about, “whack” ninja loans?
A CDO, a what?
Are you willing to take risks?
Are you a moral hazard?
Those are around the first 100 pages of a 300 page book
In order to find out the rest, you better read the book
I don’t want to give the whole book away
Okay, now let me stop rhyming
Oh no, this book has really turned on my “creative juices” and I can’t stop rhymin’
Maybe I’ll go take a nap, that’ll cool me down
I’ll stop writing this review, RIGHT NOW
By the way, no I am not a representative for this book
I am just an economics book lover
I only kept the “buys” references in this review
Just to keep the rhymes flowing
Rating: 5 / 5
Read Liaquat Ahamed, Yves Smith for Great Depression analysis (Ahmet) and current disaster (Smith). Read Minsky and Skidelsky for a clearer understanding of what Keynes himself thought (General Theory, which I’ve read twice in 3 decades, is a little murky) and for a clearer understanding of the limits of governmental intervention and, perhaps, size.
This book takes all of an hour to read, which should tell you how complete the exposition of ideas is or isn’t. This would make a decent outline for a two or three volume work that actually examined the ideas Roubini glossed over. Worse, Roubini seems not to understand aspects of Keynes and clearly doesn’t have a good grasp, at least not that was put to paper, of the driving forces, at least in the particular, behind the banking crisis of 2006 – 2009. The abuses of the Central Limit Theorem engaged in by both the banking and trading communities are not even alluded to, yet they are the why’s of LTCM and AIG collapses.
Rating: 2 / 5
If you want to know how Congress enables shadow banking (”a sprawling collection of nonbank mortgage lenders, hedge funds, broker dealers, money market funds, and other institutions that looked like banks, acted like banks, borrowed and lent like banks, and otherwise became banks – but were never regulated like banks”), or if you want to know how investment banks (and the hedge funds they control) finance and securitize mortgages, assemble them, and devise collaterized debt obligations that for example yield principal payments from a home in San Diego linked to interest payments from a home in Louisiana, or if you want to know the reason bank holding companies and the banks they own can legally move assets off balance sheet to frustrate federal bank regulators (”regulatory arbitrage”), read this book. Every page advances the subject and you’ll run out of ink underlining and annotating. I use it in my practice litigating institutional fraud cases.
Rating: 5 / 5
Nouriel Roubini’s Crisis Economics is part economic history leading up to current economic crisis and part book of recommended reforms to the economic crisis.
The first part of the book describes the financial markets. Compared to other economic books that I have read, this book’s description of the financial crisis is pretty good and quite comprehensive, particularly about the Fed and banks. Not many books offer a good explanation about the Fed and not many describe the balance sheets of banks. This book has both.
In the second part, he offers a number of recommendations of how to reform financial markets. Instead of scaling back the role of government and the Fed in the financial market, the recommendations are reforms to the existing market.
Roubini seems to have a Keynesian bent, more than an Austrian one, even though he believes in Keynesian as a short-term fix and Austrian for a long term solution. He finds the tax cuts foolish but makes little mention of cutting expenditures. He recommends more government involvement in regulating banks. It’s like keeping the Fed and government as regulators in the financial markets as they were but change the regulation to prevent another crisis. It’s like trying to keep all the goodies that the Fed and government offered but tweak it to prevent another crisis. This reminds of David Walker’s Comeback America.
I would recommend reading the first half of this book; it’s really good. The second half on the other hand is so-so. If you’re in the Austrian camp or a libertarian, you might be disappointed. If you’re OK with Fed and government involvement in the financial market, like right now, you might not be disappointed. It is interesting that people can read the same piece of history and come up with two very different conclusions. The first part of the book is worth getting the book.
Rating: 5 / 5