Plunder and Blunder

Dean Baker, an economist who publicly predicted both the dot-com and housing collapses, uses this short, sharp book to walk general readers through exactly how the 1990s stock bubble and the 2000s housing bubble were allowed to inflate and then detonate. The most valuable thing here is Baker's credibility: he documented warnings that policymakers and financial media ignored, which makes his account feel less like hindsight and more like accountability. The writing is clear and doesn't require an economics background. The tradeoffs are real — the book's progressive policy lens is present throughout, and its narrow focus means the proposed solutions get less space than the diagnosis deserves. Still, as a plain-English primer on how these crises happened, it holds up.