Spending and Saving

The Book Reporter: Dumb Money

To read Dan Gross’s Dumb Money is step into a parallel universe populated with swaggering fast-talkers who breathe helium to swell their egos and speak a strange language filled with exotic financial terms – fixed-income products, adjustable-rate mortgages, and mortgage backed securities. At first, these people seem wonderfully smart. But as Gross sees it, their brains are actually steeped in a noxious brew of groupthink, hubris, and plain old stupidity. In his new book Dumb Money, Gross asks a few pressing questions: how did the ownership society turn into a bailout nation? How did an era of cheap money transform into a time of dumb and dumber money? Gross, a senior editor at Newsweek and “Moneybox” columnist on Slate.com,  provides a roller-coaster chronicle of the past decade’s money culture, looking at how the virus of debt spread from sub-prime hustlers to Wall Street to Hollywood, and finally, to Main Street. His book serves as a sharp critique of the people who should have known better and didn’t. It’s also warning to all of us to pay more attention to what’s happening on Planet Bubble before the next cycle.

Tags: cheap money, Dan Gross, hubris, Wall Street