Capital Offense: How Washington's Wise Men Turned America's Future Over to Wall Street

There's plenty of blame to spread around for the Great Recession: Wall Street, government regulators, mortgage lenders, and sub-prime borrowers have all, at various times, been held responsible. In Michael Hirsh's view, however, the real culprits are the free-marketeers – economic theorists such as Milton Friedman and Treasury chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke – who placed excessive faith in the self-correcting powers of unfettered markets and failed to anticipate the imminent crisis. Hirsh's understanding of the philosophical and political origins of the credit crunch is considerably broader and deeper than those of most reporters, who merely recount Wall Street's recent failures. Still, it's difficult to directly tie economists and politicians to the mortgage bubble. Milton Friedman's free market principles may have led Ronald Reagan to repeal Glass-Steagall provisions, fomenting the crisis, but regulation alone wasn't responsible for unscrupulous and irresponsible lending or exponential growth in the derivatives market. Still, Hirsh's perspective is valuable, and he acknowledges nuances frequently ignored by others, such as the gender of Washington's derivatives regulator, Brooksley Born, a rare woman among men and thus a "lightweight" to be ignored by swaggering Wall Street veterans like Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, who regarded her cautionary pleas for regulation as a failure of machismo. (Sept.)