Credit Crisis

In the summer of 2007, the subprime empire that Wall Street had built all came crashing down. On average, 50 lenders a month were going bust - and the people responsible for the crisis included not just unregulated loan brokers and con artists, but also investment bankers and home loan institutions traditionally perceived as completely trustworthy.

Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents due to unforeseen circumstances. Rather, these fluctuations result from the complex bargains made between politicians, bankers, bank shareholders, depositors, debtors, and taxpayers.

In the midst of one of the most serious financial upheavals since the Great Depression, George Soros writes about the origins of the crisis and proposes a set of policies that should be adopted to confront it. Soros places the current crisis in the context of his decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity.

Soros makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great credit crisis and its implications for our nation and the world.

The credit crunch affected every investor and every consumer, every industry and every government program, yet few people truly understand how it happened. Subprime mortgages were center stage, but behind the scenes a conspiracy of greed among bankers, investors, rating agencies and regulators imperiled everyone's financial future. We need to know what went wrong and how to change the practices that led to this calamity.