More than any I have read so far, this book has captured all the major factors that have contributed to the financial crisis we are now facing. Barry Ritholtz does an excellent job of documenting all the missteps, moral hazard, short-term thinking, unintended consequences, bailouts and greed that have brought us to the brink. If you want to know how to turn an economic superpower into a bailout nation on the edge of financial collapse, in this book Ritholtz lays out the step-by-step recipe and we as a nation have followed it to a “T.” The continuing pattern throughout Ritholtz’s chronicle is that using a bailout as a response to a financial crisis plants the seeds for a bigger financial crisis requiring a bigger bailout. Given that we are in the midst of the biggest bailout in the history of man, the seeds that are being planted now should reap a bountiful harvest of disaster. After reading this, you will know whom to be mad at…especially when the next (perhaps fatal) shoe drops.