THE TWO TRILLION DOLLAR MELTDOWN Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash CHARLES R. MORRIS

"In his brief but brilliant book, Morris describes how we got into the mess we are in... Few writers are as good as Morris at making financial arcana understandable and even fascinating."
--The New York Times Book Review

"The Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles R. Morris deserves a spot on any bedside reading table. Morris, a former banker and sometime writer for The Atlantic Monthly, more than accomplishes his stated goal of telling his story 'briefly and crisply.' For instance, he manages to make clear both the mechanics of slicing and dicing collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and why these and similar securitized credits and derivative securities went spectacularly bust."
--BusinessWeek

"The first big book on the credit crunch saw the crisis coming three years ago... However up to date it may seem, this book is no rush job. Morris deftly joins the dots between the Keynesian liberalism of the 1960s, the crippling stagflation of the 1970s and the free-market experimentation of the 1980s and 1990s, before entering the world of ultra-cheap money and financial innovation gone mad...[Morris's] provocative book is…a well-aimed opening shot in a debate that will only grow louder in coming months."
--The Economist

"Charles Morris, author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, isn't one for sugarcoating. His analysis is dour and grim, but certainly not dull. And when read against a backdrop of an ever-weaker economy, increasingly anxious economists and a stream of gloomy predictions, it can be downright scary….Morris serves up a sharp, thought-provoking historical wrap-up of the U.S. economy and its markets, along with clear scrutiny of today's economic woes."
--USA Today

"[The Trillion Dollar Meltdown] is an absolutely excellent narrative of the horror that we have in the credit markets right now. … It's a wonderful explanation of how it happened and why it's so rotten, and why it will take a long time to unwind."
— Paul Steiger, Editor in Chief of ProPublica

""A number of new books describe the link between derivatives, subprime mortgages, and the meltdown of '08, and they all have the claim on our attention of having been written before the full scale of the implosion became clear….Charles Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown was handed to the publisher last Thanksgiving, a fact that gives Morris, a former banker, rock-solid status as a predictor of the crash. He homes in on the complexity and the paradoxical unpredictability of these financial instruments, which were supposed to manage risk and ended up magnifying it."
--The New Yorker