The 1980s witnessed a lemming-like rush into the sea of debt on the part of the American industrial and financial communities, with consequences we are only beginning to appreciate.
It is a fitting epitaph to the credit binge of the \'80s."--Ron Chernow, The Wall Street Journal..
A splendid, tooth-gnashing saga That should be savored for its ghoulish humor and passionately debated for its iconoclastic analysis. . . . "A brilliantly eccentric, kaleidoscopic tour of our credit lunacy.
The result is required--and wickedly entertaining--reading for everyone who wants or needs to understand how the world really works.
Based on original scholarship as well as firsthand observation, Grant\'s book puts our recent love affair with debt in an entirely fresh, often chilling, perspective.
As the pace of lending grew, the government undertook to bear more and more of the creditors\' risk--a pattern, begun in the Progressive era, which reached full flower in the "conservative" administration of Ronald Reagan.
In the 1980s, it was almost impossible to refuse one.
At the turn of the century, it was almost impossible for the average working person to get a loan.
Two long-running trends converged in the 1980s to create one of our greatest speculative booms: the democratization of credit and the socialization of risk.
It was the culmination of a long cycle of slow relaxation of credit practices--the subject of James Grant\'s brilliant, clear-eyed history of American finance.
But the speculative frenzy of the eighties didn\'t just happen.
The 1980s witnessed a lemming-like rush into the sea of debt on the part of the American industrial and financial communities, with consequences we are only beginning to appreciate
