Systemic weekend reading

How old is the credit crunch? Old enough, it seems, for the “How we got here and how it will all end” books to have started hitting the shelves. Last weekend, The New York Times’ sane business columnist Floyd Norris reviewed “Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace” and “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash”—the latter characterized as “brief but brilliant”—in the Sunday Book Review.

Barry Gewen added to the week’s cheery start on Monday with a review of Kevin Philips’ “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.”

The final pages of his bleak new book...tell of an “unprecedented” number of Americans planning to leave the country or thinking about it. Readers of “Bad Money” may come away with a similar impulse to flee.

The price is definitely right for the unintentional comedy in the Useless Bank of Switzerland’s “Shareholder Report on UBS’s Writedowns.” The sanitized version of a report demanded by the Swiss Federal Banking Commission explains the bank’s adventures in US residential mortgage securities. Shockingly, the losses were entirely due to the chicanery of people currently pursuing other interests including, no doubt, consulting attorneys as to whether or not the non-disparagement provisions of their severance agreements have been breached.

The other systemic issue confronting the global financial system is, of course, regulatory incompetence. “Fooling Some of the People All of the Time,” by Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn, tells the story of his six year all-in battle with the extraordinarily sleazy Allied Capital (ALD), and its sleazy allies at the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

It is a surprisingly dark story, in which Mr. Einhorn’s usual winning touch vanishes for most of the narrative. As he struggles to figure out why, he appears naïve at certain times, petulant at others. But he presses on anyway, confident that vindication will come. It never really does...

...Large chunks...amount to an angry man's recital of his grievances—and Mr. Einhorn has some good ones. An SEC lawyer who quizzed him aggressively about his short-selling methods later went into private practice and registered as a lobbyist for Allied.

Links to the reviews after the jump...

Anatomy of a Collapse
by Floyd Norris
The New York Times Apr. 20 2008

What Ails the American Economy?
by Barry Gewen
The New York Times Apr. 21 2008

Shareholder Report on UBS’s Writedowns
Useless Bank of Switzerland Apr. 20 2008

The Money Kept Vanishing
By George Anders
The Wall Street Journal Apr. 23 2008