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    Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown
    Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown
    Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown
    Audiobook8 hours

    Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown

    Written by Edmund L. Andrews

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Veteran New York Times economics reporter Edmund L. Andrews was intimately aware of the dangers posed by easy mortgages from fast-buck lenders. But, eager to buy a home and start a new life, he gave in to temptation and began a surreal adventure into the mortgage mayhem that nearly wrecked our economy.

    Busted weaves together the author's own ride to the edge of bankruptcy with the tragicomic stories of his lenders, the Wall Street pros behind them, and the policymakers in Washington who were oblivious until it was too late. The story takes Andrews to the offices of Alan Greenspan, the mansions of subprime-mortgage millionaires in southern California, a despondent deal makers' convention in Las Vegas, and Wall Street. Rich with on-the-ground reporting, Busted is a darkly humorous exploration of the cynicism and self-destructive judgment that led to America's biggest economic calamity in generations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 3, 2009
    ISBN9781400183326
    Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown

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    Reviews for Busted

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    • 4/5
      Edmund L. Andrews was in love. That’s when the New York Times business reporter began making rotten financial decisions, starting with a $472,000 subprime mortgage loan. And he kept on making even worse decisions until he became the poster boy for the mortgage meltdown, representing those people with good incomes and good intentions who nonetheless got into financial hot water. (It is obvious the author doesn’t listen to Suze Orman’s advice.)Woven with the skeins of his story are interviews with some of the principal players in the Mortgage Meltdown – up to and including Alan Greenspan. We learn about liars’ loans, ARMs, CDOs, FICO, securitization and more. If you’ve been wondering whom to blame for the economy’s meltdown in 2008-2009, Busted will provide a long list. Ultimately, however, most of the books insight is provided through the author’s own story –how the debt crisis affects ordinary people. The author’s in depth knowledge of the economy and his explanations of the how the mortgage crisis unfolded helps put the heartbreaking individual stories in context. After this book was published, the author took a buyout at the New York Times. (One hopes that helped get his financial house in order, but I’m guessing not.) He was also criticized for not revealing that his second wife, who features prominently in his story, declared bankruptcy twice. That might have provided some more information, but would have only added a little detail to a litany of the financial sins he has already confessed.
    • 3/5
      It’s a good hook: economic reporter for the New York Times finds himself with a no-doc mortgage eating up his savings and endangering his marriage, because he was just as willing to take risks, hoping everything would work out, as the people he wrote about. He blames himself, but also the mortgage brokers willing to write ridiculous loans and the financial firms securitizing risk so that nobody in the chain had any incentive to care about whether people could pay these loans back—the big firms had the ability to appreciate the risks, but they thought they could just transfer those risks to someone else. As we now know, they couldn’t. Andrews isn’t particularly sympathetic—less so than he even thinks, probably, since he comes off like a guy who isn’t a physical abuser only because he manages to limit himself to emotional abuse and occasional violence against household items—but it’s hard to fault his point that as between borrowers and lenders we shouldn’t focus our disapproval on the borrowers, and we should be concerned that the lenders are getting bailouts without having to do anything for borrowers.Andrews has also come under criticism for not disclosing in the book that his new wife had declared bankruptcy before they got married, which might be related to her—and his!—attitudes towards money as their problems built. They bought their house so that they’d have a big enough place for their combined families, but he was still paying so much alimony and she wasn’t getting the court-ordered child support, so his income didn’t match his actual ability to pay on the new mortgage; and there their troubles began. His personal story is interwoven with an account of how the mortgage crisis built and broke, but if you’ve been reading about this in the papers for a while there’s nothing new here. There is a point at the end where he recounts the evidence that subprime lenders targeted minorities, but he presents the “nondiscrimination” story that minorities were just riskier as about equally plausible—until he meets two (white) women who argue that they got worse loans because of their gender; one of them had essentially the same economic profile as he did and got her loan in the same area at the same time, but got a much, much worse loan, and his eyes were opened to the existence of bias! Well, as they say, let’s not focus on his lateness to the party and be glad that he showed up at all, I guess.