Book Note: Other People’s Houses: How Decades Of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, And Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages A Thrilling Business, by Jennifer Taub

OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES ADDS TO A GROWING LITERATURE on the origins of the Financial Crisis of 2008. Jennifer Taub’s contribution provides one of the most comprehensive studies to date. She outlines the many causes of the crisis, dispels myths, and explains what has been done—or how little has been done—in the wake of the crisis, while keeping the perspectives of struggling homeowners front and center. Taub begins by showing how the 2008 crisis was a continuation of the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s and 1990s that brought countless farmers and banks to ruin. In both crises, the “same players” operated, she argues, just under “new names” and in “new institutions with the same frailties.”2 She also reveals how the United States Congress, under pressure from the saving and loans industry, dismantled the New Deal regulatory framework, thus allowing savings and loans institutions to operate with much more risk. This deregulation and “desupervision” of the industry would become an essential cause of the 2008 crisis