Credit Crisis

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.

In the 1970s, a new wave of feminism was sweeping America. But in the boys’ club of banking and finance, women were still infantilized—no credit without a male cosigner, and their income was dismissed as unreliable. If bankers weren’t going to accommodate women, then women had to take control of their own futures. In 1978 in Denver, Colorado, the opening of the Women’s Bank changed everything.

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.

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.   

'This is more than a richly detailed story about the hubris, corruption and incompetence that doomed Credit Suisse; it's a stark warning to all of us about what happens when we let bankers do what they like' - Oliver Bullough, bestselling author of Butler to the World --- For centuries, Swiss...

In this shocking and illuminating road trip through an America ravaged by debt, award-winning film director James Scurlock examines our multitrillion-dollar addiction to easy credit in all of its absurdities and contradictions. Maxed Out ventures beyond the mind-numbing statistics to expose a...