Other People's Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business

"Yes, it is. Superficially, this book might appear to be a clone of Warren and Tiyagi’s book—a drab technical story told with dramatic force by an author unsympathetic to high finance, now morphing into a political player. It isn’t, really. For one reason, it concentrates on real estate, particularly the residential housing market. Also, I don’t know of any book that does a better job of drawing the personal and the institutional together in the ritualized craziness of modern real estate finance. She interweaves the macro and micro—and explains the abstract financial structure while showing its effect on real people. Yes, but I don’t think it’s quite fair to say the decision prevents modification, as if to suggest it’s the court’s fault. It’s better to say the court was telling us what the legislatures meant when they wrote the statute. And note the decision was nine-zip. And if they’d asked me it would have been ten-zip. This was what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended. Could the drafters have written differently? Sure. Could they change the statutes now? Sure, but when you get into the weeds, you realize it’s not that easy to figure out exactly what kind of rewrite makes sense. In general, I guess I would although I might not frame it quite that way. Recall that bankruptcy is part of a larger system. If I were sovereign, I might monkey around with the bankruptcy system, but even as to debtors and creditors, there are other things I’d do first. I’d much rather work for ways to change the system such that so many insane deals just don’t happen to begin with. I don’t see any good reason for a system wherein 26 people together own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world population. I’d love a world where just about any adult can make a living such that s/he can support a family. I’d love to build a system that exists for some purpose other than the enrichment of bankers. Then I’ll worry about ‘overreaching creditors’ and ‘irresponsible debtors’ and I think that problem will be manageably small."