Quote Originally Posted by Schmedlap View Post
Looking for good background material regarding the financial crisis, with specific emphasis on the following...

- Decision-making process for repealing provisions of Glass-Steagals and the hindsight analysis
- Rationale for eliminating the uptick rule and the hindsight analysis
- Impact of foreign investment on housing bubble (would it have happened without it?)
- How AIG got so deep into credit default swaps
- The role of Fannie Mae in the increase of subprime lending
- Changes or proposed changes for corporate governance, leverage requirements, and other legislative responses made or proposed

Non-controversial articles that lay out the facts as most would agree on them are ideal - at least to start off. I'm not looking for "inside accounts," such as books that detail the minute-by-minute deals that resulted in Bear Stearns being purchased or Lehman Brothers failing. Big picture, policy-maker perspective is ideal, preferably stuff worthy of inclusion in a bibliography.

Any takers? The only book on my list, for the moment, is the one by Barth (it looked good when I flipped through it at B&N, but the $60 price tag was a bit steep for a book that I wasn't sure I would regret buying - I now see it for half that at amazon - and, yes, I will "tweak the surge"). There seems to be dozens of books that are similar, but each seems to have an ideological agenda to lay blame, rather than hashing out what happened.
James Galbraith's website with index to his papers pick and choose as you want. Also Malcom Gladwell's new book (can't remember the title) but he is supposed to have a chapter in there on certain persons who saw the whole coming just by Reading certain documents at least according to the TV interview I saw.

http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/JG/publications.html