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By John B. Taylor This review is from a syndication service of The Washington Post. In "Reckless Endangerment," Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner argue that cozy connections between government and the financial industry were the primary cause of the financial crisis. While many economists-including this reviewer-have argued that government actions caused the crisis, Morgenson and Rosner use their investigative skills to dig down and explain why those actions were taken. The book focuses on two government agencies, Fannie Mae and the Federal Reserve. The mutual support system is better explained and documented in the case of Fannie, the government-sponsored enterprise that supported the home mortgage market by buying mortgages and packaging them into marketable securities, which it then guaranteed and sold to investors.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman employed a bit of imagination while discussing the need for fiscal stimulus on Fareed Zakaria's "GPS" last week, playfully suggesting that the discovery of an impending alien attack would force the American Congress to shelve debates about inflation and budget deficits and spend at a rate that would end the current recession in a year and a half. "If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat, and really, inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months," he mused. "And then if we discovered, 'Whoops! We made a mistake. There aren't actually any space aliens ...' " the spending would leave us better off. "There was a 'Twilight Zone' episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace," he added. "Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus." -ARK