The Crunch: The Scandal of Northern Rock and the Escalating Credit Crisis

by Alex Brummer

On August 9, 2007 France's largest bank announced that it would suspend trading in two huge investment funds it controlled. The same day three German banks revealed that they were close to collapse. A few days later came the first run on a British bank since the 1860s as vast queues of worried investors besieged Northern Rock. Within weeks, the government was forced to bail out this previously little known bank to the tune of £30 billion, share prices in other mortgage lenders were plummeting, and alarming news arose from several banks in the United States. Award-winning journalist Alex Brummer painstakingly traces the course of this crisis from its origins in the subprime market to its explosion on to the international scene. It is a story of greed, mismanagement, and dithering in which bankers seeking to make a quick buck, regulators engaged in turf wars and blame-avoidance, and governments paralyzed by the sheer scale of the problem all conspired to bring the banking system almost to its knees. It is also a story of the 1.5 million people in the US who have already been thrown out of their houses; the entire population of the UK who have been co-opted to guarantee Northern Rock with £30 billion of public money; borrowers everywhere who are now finding credit more expensive and harder to get.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2008

Reviews

[Rizvan Jaldeen]

can read like a fiction

[Paul Fadoju]

A nice easy read of seeing the depravity of the Financial Market. Alex Brummer was in the centre of all this, and yet He comes out to write a book to sell....We are all Part of the Matrix to make money but the book gives you a good insight into the world of Banking

[Tony]

so far so good, "it was the ratings"! could not finish it... :-(

[Ellen]

Needs updating - there are better books out there. This concentrates really on the Northern Rock crisis with a few add ons.