The Trillion-Dollar Meltdown, by Charles R. Morris

Notice to the World: Fire sale of U.S. assets! Everything must go to raise immediate cash! Contact us with your best offer!

The Trillion-Dollar Meltdown, by Charles R. Morris
Rating: 4 ants.
How the current credit meltdown developed and why it’s got everyone so scared.

It’s in the news every day: Abu Dabi, Dubai, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Russia are all being courted to buy U.S. banks, financial institutions and investments, and other assets to keep us afloat. How did the richest nation on earth fall so deeply into debt?
As Morris explains, it wasn’t hard, thanks to computerized financial models and instruments, monetary deregulation or no regulation, economic amnesia, and good old-fashioned GREED. This toxic combination has bankrupted many of our largest financial institutions, crippled our economy, thrown millions out of their homes, and mortgaged the financial future of our country for years to come.

Over the past few years, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve actually loosened regulation and did nothing to stop the housing bubble. And there’s no end in sight for the next couple of years. Here are a few of the consequences so far:

1. Because banks and others have lost billions, they have little or no cash to extend credit to businesses for growth. Recession may go into depression.
2. The country is in an economic freefall, and no one really knows what to do about it. The cure is likely to be a wrenching loss of jobs, income, and growth before things can be turned around.
3. Millions of people have been thrown out of their homes. Communities are suffering a kind of blight many have not seen since the Great Depression—or have not ever seen in their history.
4. Job losses are likely to continue as the double whammy of rising prices and the falling economy hits ordinary businesses and their people.
5. We are experiencing the largest wealth gap between the top 10 percent and the rest of us since the late 1800s. While financial executives and unethical brokers walk away with millions, the rest of us will pay for their greed and failure by footing the bill for massive bailouts of financial institutions.

Read this book—Charles Morris is one of those rare financial birds: someone who sees beneath the hype and denial and can tell you the truth.

Be warned that he has to use a bewildering array of acronyms: CLO, CDO, SIV, LIBOR, HFs, etc. Just know that they represent financial instruments used by brokerage firms, mortgage brokers, and banks to make money from packaging people’s mortgages and selling them and reselling them. And these instruments were bought by other countries as investments. As the mortgages started going bad, these countries lost billions—and continue to lose billions more as the credit crisis keeps spreading.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first meltdown. Remember the 2001-2003 dot.com bust or the S & L bailouts of the 1980s? Don’t we ever learn anything from the past? The short answer is NO. Why? The amount of money to be made from these bubbles is simply too hypnotizing. Once greed kicks in, these bubbles feed on themselves, and when they burst, they leave a path of destruction that takes years to repair. The top players take their millions and leave the rest of us to pay the bill—ruining our dreams of a home of our own, a secure retirement, money for health care, for our children’s education, for future economic growth.

Charles Morris’s book inspires a new definition of GREED: Getting Rich at the Expense of Everyone else’s Dreams.--Sue B.

In Search of Memory, by Eric R. Kandel

This is your brain; this is the world inside your brain

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
Rating: 5 ants.
Without doubt, the best explanation of how your brain learns, remembers, and builds your personal world.

Why does practice make perfect? How do you remember your name from one day to the next? Why do people recall vividly where they were on September 11, 2001, but not on September 9?

In his remarkable book, In Search of Memory, Eric Kandel answers these questions by interweaving his personal story with his fascinating discoveries as a brain researcher. Working from the 1950s to the present time, Kandel and his coworkers have completely changed our understanding of how the brain works.

One of their most startling discoveries is that the brain is far more plastic and adaptable than scientists had thought. It does not contain a fixed number of neurons and neural connections. It will build more as it is challenged and stimulated by the outside world. And the more emotion is associated with an event or action, the more indelible the memory becomes. Hormones released by emotions interact with the proteins that carry information to build a vivid long-term memory of an event. In a very real sense, we don’t remember an event so much as how we felt about it.

But it’s when Kandel and his group study the process of vision that it becomes clear how our senses and memories build a deeply personal view of the world. Our eyes do not see objects, only edges and shapes, like bits of data. These bits are assembled in the brain into a mosaic-like image, which we must learn to recognize and then name and then remember. Anyone who has watched a baby or toddler learn to identify objects and people can see this process in action.

But the brain also filters out what is not essential or important to our immediate needs. As a result, we don’t experience the world as it is. We see only what we pay attention to. We remember only what is important to us. Moment to moment, our brain is perceiving and naming this “self”centered world into being, disregarding the rest. The process is so automatic we don’t even know we are doing it.

This is a rich, compelling journey into a man’s life and into the human brain. The complexity and astonishing intricacy of the world contained in our skulls is worth every moment you will spend with this book. --Sue B.