After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead

One of our wisest and most clear-eyed economic thinkers offers a masterful narrative of the crisis and its lessons Many fine books on the financial crisis were first drafts of history?books written to fill the need for immediate understanding. Alan S. Blinder, esteemed Princeton professor, Wall Street Journal columnist, and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, held off, taking the time to understand the crisis and to think his way through to a truly comprehensive and coherent narrative of how the worst economic crisis in postwar American history happened, what the government did to fight it, and what we can do from here?mired as we still are in its wreckage. With bracing clarity, Blinder shows us how the U.S. financial system, which had grown far too complex for its own good?and too unregulated for the public good?experienced a perfect storm beginning in 2007. Things started unraveling when the much-chronicled housing bubble burst, but the ensuing implosion of what Bli