This looks like a must-have for the library and by getting a favorable review from the great Martin Fridson, I will almost certainly add it to my collection based on just that.

That said, I already have a bit of hesitancy from Fridson's overview of the book's perspective on the '06-'08 "housing crises". I am a practitioner having run a long/short structured credit hedge fund from '02-'10, and have been frustrated with the complete reluctance of any study to call a spade a spade on the GFC subject. The root cause of the housing crises of '06-'08 was dishonesty on loan applications. That means that primarily loan officers and in many cases borrowers themselves blatantly lied on their loan apps. Had all the loan apps had honest info on them, the rating agency models would not have been too bad at all. That said, much fewer loans would have been made. I'm not saying Wall St. and the rating agencies are innocent, as the entire MBS apparatus was set up to incentivize dishonesty on loan apps but that doesn't change the fact that it is wrong to lie. In a world where there is no dishonesty on loan apps, much fewer loans would have been made but the rating agency models would have worked. Why has it been taboo to point out the root cause? My guess is because borrowers are voters - nobody wants to get on the wrong side of voters these days. Btw, isn't it odd that all of those screaming that we had an "over-supply" of housing in '07 are the same ones screaming that we have an "under-supply" of housing today? I'd love to see a study of the GFC with honest loan docs only and liar loan docs (including full doc, low doc, "no-doc") taken out of the data. It wasn't the rating agency models, it was the loan officers and the borrowers.