Image Courtesy of Cato Institute

Book Review
Title: Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis
Author: Johan Norberg
Publisher: Cato Institute, 2009; 208 pages; $21.95 list

Somewhere I once read a description of homeowners’ habitual equity-tapping before the bubble burst so vivid it embossed an image permanently on my brain.

The exact words I don’t remember, but my mental image is of a scientific laboratory full of cages containing miniaturized homeowners, each pressing away at a lever on their mini homes to get their addictive fix of cash from their homes. Some of them go so far as to resemble Homer Simpson after scoring a doughnut, tongues lolling out as they drool, “Moneeeeeey. Goooooood.”

That image came back to me afresh when I first read the title of Johan Norberg’s new book, “Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis.”

It was appropriate that the mere title of “Financial Fiasco” would start out sparking some imagery, because the meat of the book continued to do so as I read on. Sure, “Financial Fiasco” is essentially another of the whodunit genre that looks to place blame for the economic catastrophe we’ve all just lived through. But it sure is fun reading! No joke — this economic deconstruction starts out a chapter on the bailout of Wall Street: “If we don’t do this,” said the balding and bearded Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as he riveted his usually kind eyes on the leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives, “we may not have an economy on Monday.”

Can you visualize it? I could. And that’s the primary strength of this book. It is so alive, so engaging, and so obviously written with a historian’s aptitude for storytelling that even a non-academic would actually read it — and enjoy reading it, to boot.

When Norberg describes former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, it’s not with a list of titles and accolades, but as a “former jazz-band saxophone player … with a bad back, who prefers to read and write lying down in his bathtub.”

Unfailingly rendering human the personae we all have come to know and love (or not so much) as playing leading roles in this economic melodrama, Norberg concisely, yet richly, tells the tale of how — in his opinion — government tangled with Wall Street tangled with the voracious appetites of individual consumers to manifest the recent collapse of various banks, the housing bubble and burst, and the general recession.