How 'Reckless' Greed Contributed To Financial Crisis

I notice that the NPR description singles out the managers of Fannie Mae, but an excerpt from the book itself is not so one-sided.

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/24/136496032/how-reckless-greed-contributed-to-financial-crisis?sc=fb&cc=fp

May 24, 2011

[NPR's interpretation]

Gretchen Morgenson, who covers world financial markets for The New York Times, has been untangling the complex foreclosure mess and efforts to reform government regulations on Wall Street for several years.

Now Morgenson and co-author Joshua Rosner have written a book about the origins of the financial meltdown. In Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, Morgenson and Rosner describe how regulators failed to control greed and recklessness on Wall Street.

Morgenson focuses on the managers of Fannie Mae, the government-supported mortgage giant. She writes that CEO James Johnson built Fannie Mae "into the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world."

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[Excerpt from book]

Recognizing that a disaster this large could not have occurred overnight, Josh and I set out to detail who did it, how, and why. We found that this was a crisis that crept up, building almost imperceptibly over the past two decades. More disturbing, it was the result of actions taken by people at the height of power in both the public and the private sectors, people who continue, even now, to hold sway in the corridors of Washington and Wall Street.

Reckless Endangerment is a story of what happens when unfettered risk taking, with an eye to huge personal paydays, gains the upper hand in corporate executive suites and on Wall Street trading floors. It is a story of the consequences of regulators who are captured by the institutions they are charged with regulating. And it is a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.

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