Francis Oakley continues his magisterial three-part history of the emergence of Western political thought during the Middle Ages with this second volume in the series. Here, Oakley explores kingship from the tenth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, showing how, under the stresses of religious and cultural development, kingship became an inceasingly secular institution. “A masterpiece and the central part of a trilogy that will be a true masterwork.”—Jeffrey Burton Russell, University of California, Santa Barbara

Hailed as "the best business book of 2010" (Huffington Post), this New York Times bestseller about the 2008 financial crisis brings the devastation of the Great Recession to life. As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers? According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, many devils helped bring hell to the economy. All the Devils Are Here goes back several decades to weave the hidden history of the financial crisis in a way no previous book has done. It explores the motivations of everyone from famous CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers, analysts, and Wall Street traders. It delves into the powerful American mythology of homeownership. And it proves that the crisis ultimately wasn't about finance at all; it was about human nature. Just as McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room was hailed as the best Enron book on a crowded shelf, so will All the Devils Are Here be remembered for finally making sense of the financial meltdown and its consequences.

Part economic history, part public history, A History of Mortgage Banking in the West is an insider’s account of how the mortgage banking sector worked over the last 150 years, including analysis of the causes of the 2007 mortgage crisis. Beginning with the land and railroad development acts that encouraged settlement in the west, E. Michael Rosser and Diane M. Sanders trace the laws, institutions, and individuals that contributed to the economic growth of the region. Using Colorado and the west as a case study for the nation’s economic and property development as a whole since the late nineteenth century, Rosser and Sanders explain how farm mortgages and agricultural lending steadily gave way to urban development and housing mortgages, all while the large mortgage and investment firms financed the development of some of the state’s most important water resources and railroad networks. Rosser uses his personal experience as a lifelong practitioner and educator of mortgage banking, along with a plethora of primary sources, academic archives, and industry publications, to analyze the causes of economic booms and busts as they relate to real estate and development. Rosser’s professional acumen combined with Sanders’s research experience makes A History of Mortgage Banking in the West a rich and nuanced account of the region’s most significant economic events. It will be an important work for scholars and practitioners in regional and financial history, mortgage market practice and development, government housing and mortgage policy, and financial stability and of great significance to anyone curious about the role of the federal government in national housing policy and the inherent risk in mortgages.

“A lucid and meticulously reported book by one of the Wall Street Journal’s ace reporters” (George Anders, Forbes contributor and author of The Rare Find). In 1938, the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a small agency called Fannie Mae. Intended to make home loans more accessible, the agency was born of the Great Depression and a government desperate to revive housing construction. It was a minor detail of the New Deal, barely recorded by the newspapers of the day. Over the next seventy years, Fannie Mae evolved into one of the largest financial companies in the world, owned by private shareholders but with its nearly $1 trillion of debt effectively guaranteed by the government. Almost from the beginning, critics repeatedly warned that Fannie was an accident waiting to happen. Then, in 2008, the housing market collapsed. Amid a wave of foreclosures, the company’s capital began to run out, and the US Treasury seized control. From the New Deal to President Obama’s administration, James R. Hagerty explains this fascinating but little-understood saga. Based on the author’s reporting for the Wall Street Journal, personal research, and interviews with executives, regulators, and congressional leaders, The Fateful History of Fannie Mae, he explains the politics, economics, and human frailties behind seven decades of missed opportunities to prevent a financial disaster.

The mortgage meltdown: what went wrong and how do we fix it? Owning a home can bestow a sense of security and independence. But today, in a cruel twist, many Americans now regard their homes as a source of worry and dashed expectations. How did everything go haywire? And what can we do about it now? In The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Mortgage and Credit Markets, renowned finance expert James Barth offers a comprehensive examination of the mortgage meltdown. Together with a team of economists at the Milken Institute, he explores the shock waves that have rippled through the entire financial sector and the real economy. Deploying an incredibly detailed and extensive set of data, the book offers in-depth analysis of the mortgage meltdown and the resulting worldwide financial crisis. This authoritative volume explores what went wrong in every critical area, including securitization, loan origination practices, regulation and supervision, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, leverage and accounting practices, and of course, the rating agencies. The authors explain the steps the government has taken to address the crisis thus far, arguing that we have yet to address the larger issues. Offers a comprehensive examination of the mortgage market meltdown and its reverberations throughout the financial sector and the real economy Explores several important issues that policymakers must address in any future reshaping of financial market regulations Addresses how we can begin to move forward and prevent similar crises from shaking the foundations of our financial system The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Mortgage and Credit Markets analyzes the factors that should drive reform and explores the issues that policymakers must confront in any future reshaping of financial market regulations.

The American government today supports a financial system based on mortgage lending, and it often bails out the financial institutions making these mortgages. The Dead Pledge reveals the surprising origins of American mortgages and American bailouts in policies dating back to the early twentieth century. Judge Glock shows that the federal government began subsidizing mortgages in order to help lagging sectors of the economy, such as farming and construction. In order to encourage mortgage lending, the government also extended unprecedented assistance to banks. During the Great Depression, the federal government made new mortgage lending and bank bailouts the centerpiece of its recovery program. Both the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt administrations created semipublic financial institutions, such as Fannie Mae, to provide cheap, tradable mortgages, and they extended guarantees to more banks and financiers. Ultimately, Glock argues, the desire to protect the financial system took precedence over the desire to help lagging parts of the economy, and the government became ever more tied into the financial world. The Dead Pledge recasts twentieth-century economic, financial, and political history and demonstrates why the greatest “safety net” created in this era was the one supporting finance.

The clearest explanation yet of how the financial crisis of 2008 developed and why it could happen again In the wake of the financial meltdown in 2008, many claimed that it had been inevitable, that no one saw it coming, and that subprime borrowers were to blame. This accessible, thoroughly researched book is Jennifer Taub’s response to such unfounded claims. Drawing on wide-ranging experience as a corporate lawyer, investment firm counsel, and scholar of business law and financial market regulation, Taub chronicles how government officials helped bankers inflate the toxic-mortgage-backed housing bubble, then after the bubble burst ignored the plight of millions of homeowners suddenly facing foreclosure. Focusing new light on the similarities between the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and the financial crisis in 2008, Taub reveals that in both cases the same reckless banks, operating under different names, received government bailouts, while the same lax regulators overlooked fraud and abuse. Furthermore, in 2013 the situation is essentially unchanged. The author asserts that the 2008 crisis was not just similar to the S&L scandal, it was a severe relapse of the same underlying disease. And despite modest regulatory reforms, the disease remains uncured: top banks remain too big to manage, too big to regulate, and too big to fail.