Top Highlights

• Perhaps, instead of a revised edition, this might more aptly be called a “reinforced” edition.
• The finger-pointing that almost invariably follows in the wake of any disaster—economic or otherwise—has generated much political rhetoric and spin, much of it repeated in the media and some of it in academia. What is crucial is to separate the facts from the rhetoric, so as to understand what got us where we are.
• The politics of it include a lot of misleading statements, but these can be broken down with the help of facts—and the more facts we look at, the more the rhetoric clears away, like fog evaporating in the sunlight.
• We may sometimes become disgusted at what we learn when we look at facts, but at least we are no longer confused by political spin.
• There was no single, dramatic event that set this off, the way the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand set off the chain of events that led to the First World War or the way the arrest of political operatives committing burglary at the Watergate Hotel led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.