The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis /by Michael W. Hudson. A few weeks after he started working at Ameriquest Mortgage, Mark Glover looked up from his cubicle and saw a coworker do something odd. The guy stood at his desk on the twenty-third floor of downtown Los Angeles’s Union Bank Building. He placed two sheets of paper against the window. Then he used the light streaming through the window to trace something from one piece of paper to another. Somebody’s signature.Mike Hudson is a terrific journalist and an even more engaging writer. The Monster is as captivating as it is deep, not 5,000 feet but 10,000. The book is a down-to-the-bone account of the genesis of the financial crisis and paints a visceral picture of the structural deficiencies in our financial system. Lehman Brothers failure is 10x Enron and 100x Long Term Capital Management. We cannot afford not to learn from the valuable lessons in this book.
