Dumb Money

How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation

By: Daniel Gross

Narrated by: Jesse Boggs

The financial crisis that has gripped this country since last September has had so many twists and turns, it would make for a great drama -- if it all were not so real and damaging. Companies are shutting down and laying off workers, 401ks are melting away, and the government is spending $700 billion dollars to bail out banks and financial institutions -- and that's only the beginning. The financial services industry, and the many industries that depend on it -- from housing to cars -- is in intensive care.

So what happened? How did we get to this point of financial disaster? Is the economy just a huge, Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme? It is a complicated and confusing story -- but Daniel Gross of Newsweek has a special gift for making complicated matters easy to understand and even entertaining. In Dumb Money, he offers a guide to the debacle and to what the future may hold. This is not so much a book about who did what, though that's part of the story. Rather, it pieces together the building blocks of the debt-fueled economy, and distills the theory and personalities behind our late, lamented easy money culture. Dumb Money is a book that finally lays it all out in an engaging way, and might just help people invest their money smartly until the gloom passes.

Deliciously sarcastic and deadpan!!!!!

This book is hilarious. Delicious sarcasm at well-deserved targets oozes from every (I would say page but it's an audiobook.) I have listened to several books on "Why did the financial meltdown happen?" and this is hands down the most entertaining. The only drawback is the narrator was kind of monotone and in my opinion didn't use the proper inflection to emphasize the right words and underscore the snark. I have heard the author of this book on podcasts, and wish the author had narrated the book himself. He would have known where to pause for just the right effect and what words to emphasize.

Good Overview of the Mess that is Wall Street

Dan Gross does a good job of outlining what happened up to December 2008. Easy to Follow and really goes to show that we need more regulation in Wall Street. I would recommend.

A witty and fun analysis

I enjoyed this book because I found it exceptionally witty and funny, but to a laymen in financial sector, some of the concept such as hedge fund derrivitives and Credit Default Swaps can be confusing, but it's analysis is still wonderful and insightful, highly diggestible, entertaining and concise essay.

Concise, well written and logical.

The book tries the impossible - to explain how the financial crisis started, grew, collapsed and took our money with it.

Daniel Gross has the uncanny ability to make complicated issues understandable and logical. If you're looking for one place to understand what went wrong, start here. If you read only one book on the collapse, this is it.

Informative

A good introduction. Being fairly ignorant of things financial I felt that there might be a lot of terms that would go over my head but the author keeps it pretty basic I suppose, given the number of books on the subject that there are other points of view but I didn't really feel that Mr. Gross was pointing out any one villain but rather a series a failures on the part of many.