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“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” – Franz Kafka

The House’s Money by Owen Sullivan

Victims and Bad Guys of the Mortgage Meltdown – 4 stars

The House’s Money cover 
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The housing market is riding high, mortgages are being handed out like free samples, and mortgage-backed securities are being packaged and sold to investment funds world-wide. Matt Whiteside has just landed a job at a prestigious firm buying and reselling the packages, but the housing bubble is about to burst and the fallout is going to hit him close to home.

This book takes the realities of the recent housing and mortgage meltdown and turns it into an intricate tale of events on a more personal level by focusing on the manipulations of one unscrupulous developer and builder to game the system while leaving families lives in ruins as their sub-prime mortgages and adjustable interest rates climb higher. The main character, Matt, finds his parents caught up in the scam and his firm is pulled into the meltdown as the sub-prime market falls apart. He becomes even more personally involved when he finds out that his new girlfriend, a housing assessor, is helping with an undercover investigation of the shady practices of a loan processor and a developer.

There was a lot going on in this story. It started out centered around Matt’s new job at the big investment company and his dealing with the pressures and complexities of the securities industry, but soon branched out to include the undercover investigation of the strawman mortgage scam being run by the shady builder and his accomplice. When Matt’s parents then purchase a home from the shady builder, the plot got even busier with the issues of the poor construction and the balloon mortgage. It’s a lot to keep track of, but manageable if you’re paying attention.

My only complaint would be with the time jumps between chapters or scenes that sometime amount to weeks or even months that can make you feel a bit dizzy and wondering what happened in between. It made me wish for a dateline to keep track of some of the longer jumps.

Recommended. The book brings the financial headlines from the past decade down to a personal level to show how people’s lives were disrupted and ruined by an industry run wild.

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