Harvard economics professor Martin Feldstein, who made himself famous by predicting in 1993 that Clinton tax increases would not raise any revenue, strikes out big time in his proposal for the housing market in Thursday’s NYT.

Lost Decades looks at why the explosion of debt happened through the traditional lens of supply-and-demand. It examines the motivations and situations of people on both side of this debt. Why did demand for debt increase in the United States? The first reason Chinn and Frieden identify is the huge deficits run during the George W. Bush years. These are the trillions spent on the Bush tax cuts, the expansion of Medicare part D and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that weren’t paid for.

Reckless Endangerment describes the players that helped create the housing bubble and bust that were at the heart of the financial crisis. Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner focus on how regulators and other officials were complicit by promoting liberalized housing finance as a way to increase homeownership. Their account chronicles how a naïve vision of the American Dream, that of homeownership as the foundation of upward mobility and stable communities, turned into a nightmare in the hands of a growth driven and increasingly predatory mortgage complex.

Any analysis that ignores control fraud is certain to distract us from the reforms essential to prevent our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Ignoring fraud led the authors to propose reforms that are criminogenic.

This is a reminder that the victims of Wall Street’s misconduct during the housing bubble actually include millions of responsible Americans who had zero involvement in the bubble, but are simply unfortunate enough to live in a community where the banks refuse to take care of their property.

The WSJ has a fascinating narrative of how both the US and Mubarak’s government were utterly unprepared for a democratic revolution in Egypt. From a meeting two months ago at which Egypt again refused democratic reforms, after which Hillary declared Egypt to be the “cornerstone of stability and security in the Middle East and beyond,” to a meeting on Monday when when a Middle East expert asked Obama’s National Security Council, “Please tell me you have contingencies in case Mubarak’s regime collapses” (the NSC said they did not), our government’s certainty that it could depend on the status quo generally and Egypt specifically has utterly collapsed.

The Final Report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is a fascinating history of the Great Crash of 2008. Join us as FDL’s Ed Walker hosts a special FDL Book Salon chat with Commissioner Byron Georgiou about the FCIC’s findings.

In The Monster, Michael Hudson gives us a detailed account of the how Roland Arnall created Ameriquest and made it into the giant of subprime lending. In the process the book implicates the major Wall Street firms, most importantly Lehman, who eagerly packaged junk loans into mortgage backed securities and more complicated instruments. He also notes the corruption of the three major credit rating agencies, who received big fees for giving these assets investment grade stamps. The list of aiders and abettors includes Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, California Governors Grey Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even the community group ACORN.

Poor little Ross Douthat, this analysis gig of his is so hard, especially while the fantasy world of conservatism continues crashing all around him when his primary job is to keep that fantasy alive, at great cost to the real world. Today we find little Ross taking on the crash of the Irish economy. In flailing about for an explanation of what has happened to this former poster-child of Chicago economics run wild, Douthat briefly flirts with an accurate explanation of what went wrong, but then pays proper homage to his overlords by discarding the painfully obvious truth in favor of yet another conservative talking point that is easily demonstrated to be false.

Dr. Raghuram G. Rajan, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago’s business school and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Readers familiar with Chicago school economics will see that the crisis has not led to a fundamental reevaluation of that school’s policy recommendations. The title of his book captures his thesis – Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures still Threaten the World Economy. Rajan writes clearly and his book is intended for the intelligent lay reader. His book contains no charts, graphs, or equations, doubtless at the urgings of the Princeton University Press. It is an ambitious book, for it seeks to explain the global crisis and different trends in the real economy and the financial sector in many nations.