Blogs

We all lived through the great Wall Street crash of 2008 - and are living through the "Great Recession" from which we are still recovering -- without really understanding how the cataclysm began and how it progressed. Roger Lowenstein's book is a fast-paced journalistic account of a decade's worth of events that is absolutely worth reading.

The question that a lot of people had, and still have, is how did the Wall Street crisis become a nationwide calamity? How did Lehman Brothers' and Bear Stearns' failures infect the whole economy? Why did millions, including thousands in our own industry, lose their jobs?

Lowenstein, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, does an excellent job of answering these questions in a manner that is both technically accurate and fully comprehensible to someone who's not an economics expert. No one comes out looking good in Lowenstein's account, certainly not the investment bankers who came up with a pile of new and dubious securities, nor the government officials who were frozen by their free-market theories and acted too late to stop the bleeding, nor the professors and forecasters who didn't see what was coming.

This isn't strictly a marketing book, but there are plenty of lessons and vital information in it for marketers.

By Jonathan Groner, public relations and writing consultant in Washington, D.C., for the May/June 2010 Issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter