Description
Book SynopsisIn his exceedingly timely and innovative look at the ramifications of the collapse of the U.S. housing market, Herman M. Schwartz makes the case that worldwide, U.S. growth and power over the last twenty years has depended in large part on domestic housing markets. Mortgage-based securities attracted a cascade of overseas capital into the U.S. economy. High levels of private home ownership, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, have helped pull in a disproportionately large share of world capital flows.
As events since mid-2008 have made clear, mortgage lenders became ever more eager to extend housing loans, for the more mortgage packages they securitized, the higher their profits. As a result, they were dangerously inventive in creating new mortgage products, notably adjustable-rate and subprime mortgages, to attract new, mainly first-time, buyers into the housing market. However, mortgage-based instruments work only when confidence in the mortgage system
Trade Review
Herman Schwartz has written an ambitious and important book that offers a 'unified field theory' of political economy to explain the U.S. housing boom, the mortgage crisis, the U.S. dependence on high levels of foreign capital, and the changing global balance of power among nations. His argument is surprising and controversial, but it is supported by data and by a deep immersion in several relevant literatures.
-- Fred Block * Contemporary Sociology *
Of the dozens of serious books that examined the determinants of the 2008 financial crisis, Herbert M. Schwartz's Subprime Nation: American Power, Global Capital and the Housing Bubble stands out for its sharp take on the large macro flows that ultimately led to the collapse of financial markets and real economies around the world. Now four years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and three years after Schwartz’s work was first published, it is worth a second look.... Few books or articles written in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis could hold up as well.
-- Siona Listokin * Journal of Planning Education and Research *
