News and Reviews
Washington Post review
“Her reporting was prescient.” In The Washington Post Frances Perkins biographer Kristin Downey is the latest reviewer to pair Our Lot with Edmund Andrews’ Busted. She flatters me and finishes him off : “A thoughtful reader can’t avoid reflecting that it might have been better if Katz had been the economics reporter, hammering home the encroaching danger in article after article, and Andrews had been the one teaching journalism.”
She accuses Andrews of a belated, self-serving conversion from booster to critic of the financial establishment in the wake of his own woes as an overloaded homedebtor. I’m honestly not sure I’d be in a position to wield a hammer of warning had I been the Fed reporter for the Times. The failures of major media to anticipate the mortgage crisis were institutional more than individual. If anything Busted shows how capable a reporter and explainer Andrews is, once one gets beyond his brave but flawed delivery of his personal story of financial derangement. The biggest difference between our books is that while Andrews offers ample descriptions of how the mortgage business went over the edge in 2005-2007, his “why” is more or less limited to “Alan Greenspan.” I do the reverse: less forensic detail on lenders’ wacky underwriting standards, more investigation into the crisis’ deeper roots in politics, economics and culture.
Should Andrews have revealed his wife’s bankruptcies? Of course. The conceit of using his own story as an everyman proxy for the millions of troubled homeowners out there doesn’t quite work: by his own account, he’s an atypical subprime borrower, white, male and high income. But as a guide to the psychology of debt and delusion, Busted delivers.
How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.