Thomas Woods Meltdown Is The Book To Read To Understand The Financial Crisis

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Meltdown, despite a couple of minor flaws, is the best one-stop analysis of the recession available, which makes it the book to give anyone who wants to understand how government intervention caused this mess and how Austrian economics can explain those causes and the problems with the proposed cures.

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He has digested complex theory and a whole range of recent history and presented the single best analysis of the current recession out there.  It is a terrific example of using Austrian economics and free-market thinking to analyze the real world–and doing it in a way that is highly accessible to the general reader.

– Steven Horwitz, Book Review, The Freeman, October 2009

Almost nobody in Washington, and precious few elsewhere, has been willing to question the greatest single government intervention in the economy, and the institution whose fingerprints are all over our current mess: America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve System.

– Thomas Woods, Meltdown, Ch 1: The Elephant In The Living Room, pgs. 2-3

Interviewed by the New York Times in early November 2008, economist James K. Galbraith claimed that perhaps 10 or 12 of the country’s 15,000 professional economists saw the economic crisis coming.  Well, few of the economists Galbraith associates with may have seen it coming, but hundreds of economists who belong to Mises’ Austrian School of economic thought sure saw it… By and large the Austrians warned of the housing bubble before anyone else, and they predicted the crash the economy is enduring now.  And the primary culprit, from their point of view, is the Federal Reserve.

– Thomas Woods, Meltdown, Ch 1: The Elephant In The Living Room, pg. 6

You can get the first chapter of Meltdown free here.

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