Kendall Giles

Just yesterday I paid $4.09/gallon for 87 octane gas in Baltimore. Many people, lured into buying bloated, inefficient cars, trucks, and SUVs made and marketed by Detroit, are now feeling similar pains in the wallet. An ABC news story suggests that gas may soon cost $7/gallon.

But it is not just the high price of gas that is causing concern. All across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of people are losing their homes to foreclosure or are unable to sell their homes, and the crown jewels of the U.S. are being bought up by unsavory foreign governments taking advantage of the weak dollar.

Everyone wants to just throw their hands into the air, but if you have wondered why these events are happening, then you might consider reading The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris.

This book won't help you get out of debt, sell your house, or improve the degrading quality of the education system. But what it will do is put the current economic crisis into context, give insight into how economic and personal spending practices contributed to the problem, and help us understand what can be done to improve our national situation. It will also help you realize why and how the much heralded Alan Greenspan and his Chicago economics theories may have actually led to our current economic downward spiral, as did the lack of critical thinking skills by the millions of Americans who tried to buy houses when they could not afford to, assisted by greedy banks, other lenders, and Wall Street. It will also show how the follies of the current Presidential administration led to the decline of American economic standing in the world, with potentially dire implications for us all going forward.

There are no quick fixes for the current situation we voted and spent ourselves into, but this book at least paints a plausible explanation for why we are here. Where we go from here depends in large part on the resilience and fortitude of the American peoples, and this book at least helps show a reality clearly the result of causes and effects rather than from forces outside our control.