Synopses & Reviews
"Hell is empty, and
all the devils are here."
-Shakespeare, The Tempest
As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers?
According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, the real answer is all of the above-and more. Many devils helped bring hell to the economy. And the full story, in all of its complexity and detail, is like the legend of the blind men and the elephant. Almost everyone has missed the big picture. Almost no one has put all the pieces together.
All the Devils Are Here goes back several decades to weave the hidden history of the financial crisis in a way no previous book has done. It explores the motivations of everyone from famous CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers, analysts, and Wall Street traders. It delves into the powerful American mythology of homeownership. And it proves that the crisis ultimately wasn't about finance at all; it was about human nature.
Among the devils you'll meet in vivid detail:
• Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide, who dreamed of spreading homeownership to the masses, only to succumb to the peer pressure-and the outsized profits-of the sleaziest subprime lending.
• Roland Arnall, a respected philanthropist and diplomat, who made his fortune building Ameriquest, a subprime lending empire that relied on blatantly deceptive lending practices.
• Hank Greenberg, who built AIG into a Rube Goldberg contraption with an undeserved triple-A rating, and who ran it so tightly that he was the only one who knew where all the bodies were buried.
• Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, aloof and suspicious, who suffered from "Goldman envy" and drove a proud old firm into the ground by promoting cronies and pushing out his smartest lieutenants.
• Lloyd Blankfein, who helped turn Goldman Sachs from a culture that famously put clients first to one that made clients secondary to its own bottom line.
• Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae, who (like his predecessors) bullied regulators into submission and let his firm drift away from its original, noble mission.
• Brian Clarkson of Moody's, who aggressively pushed to increase his rating agency's market share and stock price, at the cost of its integrity.
• Alan Greenspan, the legendary maestro of the Federal Reserve, who ignored the evidence of a growing housing bubble and turned a blind eye to the lending practices that ultimately brought down Wall Street-and inflicted enormous pain on the country.
Just as McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room was hailed as the best Enron book on a crowded shelf, so will All the Devils Are Here be remembered for finally making sense of the meltdown and its consequences.
Review
"Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera methodically reconstruct the 30 years that culminated in the Great Recession, years in which Wall Street's relentless greed and Washington's delusional regulators jointly built a time bomb - and thwarted any attempt to disarm it.... The depth of reporting is enormous."
-Time
"Not for a page do the authors let any political theory or party off the hook as they deftly weave arguments, refutations and facts upon facts in this gripping account."
-The Associated Press
"All the Devils Are Here is the best business book of 2010.... They put numbers and nuances into a human drama and wrote a business book that is as riveting as an adventure novel. I thought the financial crisis had been completely covered with great books by great writers and there wasn't anything else left to say. McLean and Nocera were able to build on the story and trace the crisis back, 30 years ago, to its roots."
-The Huffington Post
"Veteran journalists Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera slam dunk this difficult project. The authors turn CDOs into something that makes sense, CEOs into the fallible humans they are, and even transform the government into a place readers can picture.... I followed the financial crisis while it was happening, and frankly always felt like pieces were missing. The books that I read after the financial crisis covered certain bits in detail, but I still had no bird's-eye view. Finally, All the Devils Are Here provided it."
-Business Pundit
"The authors succeed in pulling the jumbled pieces of the financial crisis together and showing how it flowed from human foibles."
-Bloomberg BusinessWeek
"Two of our finest business journalists have written a thorough account of the origins of the financial crisis. More than offering just a backward look, it helps explain the most troubling business headlines of the moment, as well as those that are certain to come."
-The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
This surprising narrative goes back more than 20 years to reveal, in rich, anecdotal detail, how Wall Street, the mortgage industry, and the government conspired to change the way Americans bought their homes, creating a perfect storm.
Synopsis
The New York Times bestseller hailed as andquot;the best business book of 2010andquot; (Huffington Post).
As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers?
According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, the real answer is all of the above-and more. Many devils helped bring hell to the economy. And the full story, in all of its complexity and detail, is like the legend of the blind men and the elephant. Almost everyone has missed the big picture. Almost no one has put all the pieces together.
All the Devils Are Here goes back several decades to weave the hidden history of the financial crisis in a way no previous book has done. It explores the motivations of everyone from famous CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers, analysts, and Wall Street traders. It delves into the powerful American mythology of homeownership. And it proves that the crisis ultimately wasn't about finance at all; it was about human nature.
Synopsis
The amount of money generated by college sports is staggering. The National Collegiate Athletic Association takes in $800 million just from its annual menand#8217;s basketball tournament.
Yet while the schools, coaches, TV networks, and sponsors all profit, the athletes themselves do not. These young stars, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, receive no compensation or endorsement deals and can be banned for the slightest infraction of NCAA rules. They put up with indentured servitude to chase their dreams of pro glory. A tiny handful each year reach the NBA or NFL, but what happens to the rest is an epic scandal: little or no real education, often no diploma, and a discouraging future.
Bestselling author Joe Nocera, a New York Times op-ed columnist and investigative reporter, has emerged as one of the NCAAand#8217;s fiercest critics. Now he delivers the definitive exposand#233; of college sports, behind the glitz of March Madness and the Bowl Championship Series. He reveals the moral, financial, and legal ramifications of an industry that claims to protect amateur athletes while exploiting their talents and hard work. He shines a powerful light on the businessmen behind the NCAA and how their hypocrisy hurts athletes at all levels.
About the Author
Bethany McLean is a writer for
Vanity Fair and the coauthor of
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. Before joining
Vanity Fair, she wrote for
Fortune for thirteen years (most recently as an editor at large) and spent three years working in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs. She lives in Chicago.
Joe Nocera is a business columnist for The New York Times and a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. He spent ten years at Fortune as a contributing writer, editor at large, executive editor, and editorial director. He has won three Gerald Loeb awards for excellence in business journalism and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. He lives in New York.