An astute and wide-ranging assessment of an urgent economic problem.
A writer offers an analysis of Fannie Mae’s contribution to the 2008 mortgage crisis coupled with recommended reforms.
There’s been no shortage of ink spilled on anatomizing the economic catastrophe of 2008, including specific analyses of the mortgage debt crisis. But there has been a surprising deficit of attention to the role played by Fannie Mae, the focus of Mukherjee’s debut book. He argues that years of imprudently weak regulation led to the growth of Fannie Mae into “an unrestricted mortgage behemoth” with more than $3 trillion in assets. Fannie Mae was transformed over time—partly as a result of its winning a territorial war with the Department of Housing and Urban Development—into a government-sponsored entity with an implicit federal guarantee of its strategic bets, in effect creating an unstable model within which private reward and risk were encouraged by the promise of taxpayers’ bearing the burden of failure. At the heart of the problem was Fannie Mae’s tremendously profitable guaranty arm, which allowed it to guarantee homeowner mortgages like an insurance provider in exchange for a fee. But when a deluge of home foreclosures compelled it to dole out massive payouts, Fannie Mae was egregiously short of funds since it had already spent its reserves on “doomed” bonds. The author furnishes a brief but impressively thorough history of Fannie Mae as well as an excellent primer on the housing market’s basic structure. In addition, he gives pragmatic but original solutions to the organization’s troubles, starting with a reduction of liability to taxpayers by winding down its portfolio. He also advocates the creation of a private servicer enterprise, which “would have the sole purpose of servicing the 120-day delinquent mortgages” from the Government Sponsored Enterprise. Mukherjee’s analysis is astonishingly concise given its breadth and, despite the technicality of the subject, remarkably accessible. He also manages to avoid even a whiff of partisan allegiance—his perspective is fashioned out of rigorous analysis versus political ideology. Finally, his suggestions for reforming current lending practices—especially those aimed at discriminatory practices—deserve a wide audience.
An astute and wide-ranging assessment of an urgent economic problem.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 89
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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