The Financial Crisis of Our Time

In 2006 residential real estate prices peaked and started to fall, then threatened the world's financial institutions in 2007, and confronted the global economy with disaster in 2008. In the past few years, millions of people have lost very substantial portions of their wealth. And while the market [...]
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In 2006 residential real estate prices peaked and started to fall, then threatened the world's financial institutions in 2007, and confronted the global economy with disaster in 2008. In the past few years, millions of people have lost very substantial portions of their wealth. And while the markets have rebounded considerably, they are still far from a full recovery. Now, professional economists, policy experts, public intellectuals, and the public at large are all struggling to understand the crisis that has engulfed us. In The Financial Crisis of Our Time, Robert W. Kolb provides an essential, comprehensive review of the context within which these events unfolded, arguing that while the crisis had no single cause, housing finance played a central role, and that to understand what happened, one must comprehend the mechanism by which the housing industry came into crisis. Kolb offers a history of the housing finance system as it developed throughout the twentieth century, and especially in the period from 1990 to 2006, showing how the originate-to-distribute model of mortgage financing presented market participants with a