Any writing I do about Central Asia tends to the more historical and runs away from the contemporary political. Mostly for the reason that the reporting out of the region--I'm not talking about Afghanistan, here--tends to be so bad, so mis- and ill-informed. Take Reuters for example:

Analysts say long-defunct groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan are regaining force in the impoverished region where ethnic tensions have long simmered under the surface.

"They (militants) are preparing the ground for a long, sustained military campaign in Central Asia," said Ahmed Rashid, a leading Pakistan-based expert on Afghanistan and Central Asia.

And then they go on to give this example or 'terrorism:'

First alarm bells rang in Central Asia last year when Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz troops fought gangs they described as terrorist -- around the time when the security situation in northern Afghanistan deteriorated sharply.

"It does not matter who exactly was behind those attacks. It still means instability, that something's going on," said one Western diplomat. "It is certainly something we are watching."

Of course they cite the defunct IMU of Juma Namangani--he who was killed in late 2001 by a US missile. And they raise the phantom of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a millenialist and anti-secular group who aims to reestablish an Islamic Caliphate by peaceful means. HT has never engaged in any form of violence, which is probably why the authorities in the region dislike them so much.

Of course the writer of the story really buries the lede:

"It is the Central Asian regimes that continue terrorising their people," said Taji Mustafa, [the HT] representative in London. "Since the declaration of the West's so-called 'war on terror', Central Asian governments have used it as a convenient umbrella to pursue, arrest and torture their political opponents."

Maybe the media ought to look into that angle?

At the center of the current fiscal troubles in Greece, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere in Europe are the promises made by governments to fund union salary increases and pension plans. Unions in Europe are much stronger than they are in North America, and in many of Europe’s less-wealthy countries, governments have chosen over the years to appease union demands even though it meant driving fiscal deficits well beyond the level tolerated by EU rules. Now that these governments are finding it impossible to continue to borrow on global markets without firm evidence that these deficits are going to be brought down, proposals to cut union pay or benefits are being met with strikes by firefighters, police, teachers, farmers, and others.

Do not for a moment think that these problems are not to be found in the United States. The difference here is that the “appeasement”, such as it is, has been concentrated at the state and local level, though the federal government has its share of unfunded promises to workers. The 50 states last year ran up a combined deficit of around $180 billion – coincidentally about the same amount that the US has spent bailing out AIG. The federal government has also helped out the states during this fiscal crisis, by lending them money to continue paying normal as well as emergency employment benefits to laid off citizens. This has averted a real crisis, since states are constitutionally required to plug any annual deficits. The real problems will show up later this year and next when the federal loans run out.

Here is one by Peter Spiro:

Cause and Effect

Cause you are poor
You go to public school.
Cause public school is free
You get a lousy education.
Cause you get a lousy education
You are uneducated.
Cause you are uneducated
You are treated with contempt.
Cause you are treated with contempt
You are contemptuous of others.
Cause you are contemptuous of others
You do not abide by the rules.
Cause you do not abide by the rules
You do not have a job.
Cause you do not have a job
You steal.
Cause you steal
You go to prison.
Cause you go to prison
Your life is wasted.
Cause your life is wasted
You are angry.
Cause you are angry
You are dangerous.
Cause you are dangerous
You are a bad effect.

And you are destroyed.

Cause you were a bad effect
Cause you were dangerous
Cause you were angry
Cause your life was wasted
Cause you went to prison
Cause you stole
Cause you didn’t have a job
Cause you did not abide by the rules
Cause you were contemptuous of others
Cause you were treated with contempt
Cause you were uneducated
Cause you got a lousy education
Cause you went to public school
Cause you were poor.

- Peter Spiro

QOTD:

This brings me to the second telling event of last week when President Obama said, kind of off-hand, apropos of the US economic situation, "You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (of Nevada) was all over Mr. Obama like a cheap suit for that. I'm sorry that the President didn't slam back the craven Mr. Reid and pull his upper lip over the top of his head. Fuck Las Vegas and fuck Nevada, and fuck all the casino operators in every pulsating gambling venue around this country. The last thing we need is to continue believing that it is possible to get something for nothing, or an industry based on that false principle. I'd go a lot further and shut down legalized gambling all over the USA, send it back to the margins, to the alleys, to the berm between the WalMart and the Target Store, to the basement boiler rooms, to the public bathrooms, to wherever it will be identified as indecent, shameful, and not healthy.

I've never been a gambler and opposed the legalization of gambling across the country for one key reason: it is a regressive tax. Those who can least afford it end up paying for it. So, if you want the lottery to fund your schools, as we did in Texas--and seriously, what the hell kind of mixed message do you we send out kids? Then you make the poor pay for it via lottery tickets.

Why bother getting everyone to pay for it fairly?

It's immoral and shameful.

All this gnashing of teeth about the Czar's inner circle is such old news. I wrote about this months ago. But it's certainly easier for Americans to blame the evil advisers of the Czar than accept the fact that the Czar shares their assumptions and ideas.

As I wrote then: "Seriously, this is a narrative trope straight out of Czarist Russia, when the peasants, long oppressed and over-taxed bemoan the fact that their Czar loves them, but is surrounded by evil ministers."

Occam's Razor, the Goodness of Fit, whatever you test you want to use, the bottom line is that Obama's advisers are a reflection of the man. Not the other way around.

Excellent piece by Ed Vulliamy in the Guardian UK. He's writing a book about Juarez and the Drug War there and tries to sum it all up:

... certain themes are inescapable: this brutality defines a war very much of its time, the first 21st-century war, because it is, in the end, about nothing. We have lived in a world where Arabs fight Jews, Hutus fight Tutsis, communists fight fascists, Serbs fight Croats, and British and American troops fight Islamist fundamentalists. They do so for a cause, faith or deeply etched tribal identity, however crazy.

But Mexico's war (some do not like calling it a war) has no such purpose. Mexicans are mutilating, decapitating, torturing and killing each other, ostensibly over money and the drug smuggling routes that provide it. But most of the ­violence revolves around the smaller profits of the domestic market and street corner. It is meted out for its own sake. Yes, there are regional and clan allegiances to the states of Tamaulipas, Michoacán or Sinaloa, but they are fluid and subject to far too many whimsical alliances and betrayals for the war to be compared to, say, tribal conflict in Rwanda.

The utter nihilism at the heart of Mexico's Drug War is shared by many young Americans today. Only our wealth and the insulation that our incredibly vigorous police state provide keep the lid on madness. And we can't afford to keep the clampdown on forever. Nor can we afford to provide gainful, meaningful employment to our young men.

And since the shared vision of our culture -- the "American Dream" of individual wealth with no responsibility to the larger community -- is utterly morally bankrupt, there is no mental barrier hold back evil. The Banksters who rule our society by shamelessly defrauding us all and then squandering the obscene profits on helicopters and high class prostitutes are just more polite versions of the killers in Juarez. They are in fact closer to the heart of the system that is producing the mega-violence in Mexico and profit from it via money laundering far more than any drug kingpin. When the "Masters of the Universe" of Wall Street are our highest vision of success it's just a matter of peeling back the mask to reveal the Death's Head behind the plastic surgery.

With no valid moral guidepost that is compatible with what we know to be true in 2010, we can expect nothing other than hedonism and selfishness, lust and greed and power and sexual violence to consume us all.

Another wise voice is that of the writer Cecilia Ballí, whose ancestors were once great ranchers around Matamoros and what is now Brownsville, Texas. "People say this is all about money," she says, "but it's about money and something beyond money; it's a social performance, a performance of power, of very male power. It's about being someone, a performance in a place and a country where that was not supposed to be possible."

The clock is ticking. Our turn is coming.

As analogies go, it's decent, but I don't think it's a snug fit:

What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Actually, I think our situation is much more analogous to that of ancient Athens. But that's just me.

Bank of America Looks Like First of Many

Michael Collins

"This merger (Bank of America and Merrill Lynch) is a classic example of how the actions of our nation’s largest financial institutions led to the near-collapse of our financial system," said Attorney General Cuomo. "Bank of America, through its top management, engaged in a concerted effort to deceive shareholders and American taxpayers at large. This was an arrogant scheme hatched by the bank’s top executives who believed they could play by their own set of rules. In the end, they committed an enormous fraud and American taxpayers ended up paying billions for Bank of America’s misdeeds."(Image)

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo's complaint filed in the New York Supreme Court, County of New York against the Bank of America and two former top executives has the potential to push that too big to fail entity off the edge of a very steep cliff. The charges of massive fraud are based on a compelling and exhaustive filing on February 4.

A trial will likely involve testimony by the current Bank of America CEO and President Brian Moynihan against defendants Kenneth Lewis, the bank's former CEO and board chairman, former chief financial officer (CFO) Joseph L. Price, and the bank itself. Price is currently in charge of BofA's credit card division.

Congratulations New Orleans to a championship well earned! And to fans who, after 42 years of futility, finally got what they most deserved!

Good piece in The Hill from Eileen M. O’Connor of the American Committee for Democracy and Justice in Pakistan. She points out that the Zardari administration, for all its own issues, is threatened by both the military and the Pakistani Supreme Court:

the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the NRO also upheld a controversial article of Pakistan’s constitution, much to the dismay of some of the brave lawyers who took to the streets to defend the court’s judicial independence and integrity last year. Article 62 was conceived in 1985 by General Zia-ul-Haq and declares that members of parliament (which includes the currently elected president, Asif Ali Zardari, and all ministers of the Cabinet) are disqualified from serving if they are not of “good character,” if they violate “Islamic injunctions,” do not practice “teachings and practices, obligatory duties prescribed by Islam,” and if they are not “sagacious, righteous and non-profligate.” Non-Muslims must have “a good moral reputation.”

Relying in any way on such entirely subjective and political standards, such as “Islamic injunctions” and “good moral reputation,” increases polarization in the country and brings into question the political independence of the Pakistani Supreme Court, which those lawyers bravely defended on the streets as critical to the rule of law.

There is two feet of new snow in my yard right now. This might not sound like much to northerners (like me, originally from Rochester, NY), but for Baltimore this is a millennial blizzard. There were thirty inches in some areas here since yesterday, I heard. It took me an hour to shovel a narrow path from my door to the driveway. The roads are deserted. Even if you can shovel out your car, where are you going to drive? Walking – like having a manual typewriter in the deep woods – reassumes its superiority.

One of the great things about snowstorms, for me, is that they free us of routines from which we lack the will (or sometimes the option) to free ourselves: errands, stores, reporting to jobs, reporting to school, deciding when to be at home and when not to be. All of a sudden, there is no place to go other than places you can reach on your own two feet while swathed in 10 pounds of clothing. Must-do's become expendable. There is no gotta-be-there thing that simply can't wait (unless you're talking hospital emergency rooms). You've got the gift of enforced open time and space, no thanks to yourself, but courtesy of an act of the Universe. Pretty cool.

I remember the early days of the coffee boom, late eighties early nineties when Seattle grunge and the coffee shop atmosphere was all the rage. In San Antonio and Houston a few hip coffee shops popped up. Candlelight in SA and a nice place in the Museum District in Houston. Of course, there was no wifi yet, so they were nice places to order a cup of Joe and curl up with a good book. Or play a video game on my oversized, underpowered laptop with about as much free memory as a gnats brain.

But within a few short years Starbucks stores were popping up on every corner and all the little independent coffee shops were put out of business. The honeymoon with Starbucks actually lasted a long time, considering. But today, I sense the reverse happening. As if there is a large cultural backlash against the mega-corp, no matter how much good they claim to do.

I'm in San Antonio for the day. I pulled up Yelp to see if there were any independents in town. San Antonio is kind of a cultural laggard, but also somewhat of a bell-weather, in the sense that when something happens in San Antonio, it's already happened everywhere else. (I don't notice these things in Austin, as Austin is usually years ahead of San Antonio.) And so, I was very surprised to see a long list of independent coffee houses here. I'm sitting in a pretty classy joint right now. The wifi is free--unlike Starbucks--and the coffee is good. It's a clean, modern looking place, in a kind of anti-Starbucks vein. It's nice to see.

Anyone else notice this happening in your town?

From I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.:

This is how it’s supposed to work. A well-run bank is a machine for making money. The basic principle of banking is to pay a low rate of interest to the people who lend money and charge a higher rate to the people who borrow it. The bank borrows at 3 percent (say), and lends at 6 percent, and as long as it keeps the two amounts in line and makes sure that it lends money only to people who will be able to pay it back, it will reliably make money forever.

Reliably make money forever! Instead the banksters got greedy, decided that a return on equity of anything less than 25% per annum was unacceptable began their binge of serial acquisitions and soon we all crashed headlong into a crisis.

Me? I'd rather make money reliably forever. Boring is good. Singles win championships and all that. But hey, I'm not a greedy, megalomaniacal, ego-centered fucktard.

From tonight's Nelson Report:

SUMMARY: preceding the President's talk to US business persons about the pressing need for China to allow the RMB to be revalued, Treasury Secretary Geithner called his Chinese counterpart, Wang Qishen.

Content of the call? Two versions: from the US, Geithner warned Wang that patience here has expired, and that if China does not launch a solid move toward rebalancing by the end of March, Obama will authorize Treasury to "cite" the PRC for currency manipulation in the twice-annual report to Congress, first due in April.

Chinese version: Wang told Geithner where he could put it, and seemingly threatened a pullback on T-bill purchases, and retaliation on US exports to China.

Discussion, below.

More after the jump.

The specter of global deflation returned to the stock market this week, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the news. The business headlines certainly were full of alarm when the Dow Jones index collapsed from 10,300 to 9,800 in one week. The move up from 9,800 to 10,300 last year – and eventually higher to 10,800 – took over three months. But that is what happens when investors get complacent about the stock market – as they certainly were going into this year. Not one of the analysts quoted by Barron’s or similar publications at the New Year felt the Dow would end 2010 down. For that matter, they still aren’t. We are in a “correction”, as far as the received wisdom goes. A new high for the Dow this year is certain to occur once we get through this necessary cleansing of the market. This too is received wisdom. What you will not read in the business press is that anything serious is going on – the markets are not going to be testing the lows of 2009, much less head beneath 6,600 – the March low for this bear market.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Synoia makes the right connections:

It's only a short step to [defining] a terrorist as someone who is seen by our government as opposed to it.

That's the real fear of this whole issue. That's the key takeaway. That's the whole point by calling it a slippery slope. It is only a matter of time before our government uses these powers against anyone, American or not, they see as opposing the government. Period.

Due process was explicitly included in the Constitution for a reason. As the Fifth Amendment States:

No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

The bureaucratic power of signing a death warrant without any due process or at the very minimum, judicial oversight, is giving the government far too much power.

If you don't think a government run amok cannot happen here, you clearly have not read your history. Sure, nothing is inevitable, but nothing, absolutely nothing is impossible, either.

It's time to have a pretty serious talk about Iran and nuclear weapons. The day is fast approaching where Iran will have the capability to manufacture high quality fissile material. I remember writing about Iran back in 2005 and the projections for said capability were somewhere in the time-frame of 2010-12. We're getting close. Bush missed the opportunity of the century to cut a deal with Iran and Obama didn't have much of a chance. He started out well, but then the election and subsequent protests in Iran changed the calculus of the regime in Tehran and the opportunity was pretty much lost. Who's fault? Everyone's and no one's, basically. But, as I said, the time is coming when Iran will have a break out capacity.

Now, I'm generally opposed to proliferation. I think it's a bad idea for new nations to acquire nuclear weapons and think the wisest course is for the current nuclear powers to do their best to put the genie back in the bottle. (Dream on, right?) At the same time, I'm realistic enough to realize that Iran is going to do what Iran is going to do. Iran has its own national interest and its own defense logic. And if it were only about Iran and the US, then I think I'd be okay with Iran having the bomb. As someone else wrote in a place I cannot find on the internet, acquiring the bomb tends to make nations much more circumspect in their foreign policy. And I think it would have a moderating influence on Iran. After all, they would have to know that if they attempted to nuke the US or its European allies the result would be a glass wasteland from the Zagros to the Dasht-i-Kavir. It would also give the US pause in its dealings with Iran, as any attack on Iran would have frightful consequences to our interests in the region as well, and quite possibly at home. That's all well and good. But if you read between the lines you'll see a faulty assumption at work here. Or, rather a sin of omission: Israel. Israel is the wild-card when it comes to Iran. And at a time when Israel is much less easier to be reigned in by American actions, Israel has a lot more freedom of action, relatively speaking. Not only is Israel a wildcard--it's also a regional spoiler on multiple levels. And I for one, don't know how to square that circle. I am sure there is a way--but I haven't heard it yet.

Bottom line is that some kind of crisis is coming and it's no longer in the medium term. I expect it'll arrive in the next year or two, at the most.

We live in a time of less and less privacy: less privacy of action and apparently, less of thought. If you think for a moment that your digital life is firewalled because of anonymity or can be compartmentalized, think again. There is literally no expectation of privacy for anything you do.

Granted, Twitter feeds are public, by their very nature. But thinking you can read someone's Twitter feed and people aren't looking at who you are reading? C'mon, how stupid are you?

Sure, you can attempt to firewall yourself by creating an anonymous avatar. But that will only get you so far. So, my suggestion is this. It's a kind of corollary to an old letter writing chestnut my father says, "son, don't write it down unless you are absolutely certain you can live with it, forever."

Same goes for the internet. Don't write something down unless you are absolutely certain you can live with the consequences. I speak from personal experience.

What is a terrorist? Is it necessarily Islamic? How about someone who is working against American interests in a place like Bolivia? Or perhaps a Christian Fundamentalist who fled the US for killing an abortion provider and is now rabble-rousing against the godless American liberals in some country, has a cult following and plans on sending many of them back to American to protest and possible firebomb abortion clinics? Perhaps even radical environmentalists? The list is not short. And every one of these categories has, within the last several years, been investigated domestically under terrorist statutes.

The slope is slippery.

And that is why this is literally terrifying:

In a striking admission from the Obama Administration's top intelligence officer, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair announced Wednesday that the United States may target its own citizens abroad for death if it believes they are associated with terrorist groups.

"We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community," Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee. He said US counter-terrorism officials may try to kill American citizens embroiled in extremist groups overseas with "specific permission" from higher up.

Who decides what a terrorist is? Who decides who a terrorist is? Apparently it is now nameless and faceless bureaucrats in our national security apparatus. Americans overseas no longer have due process.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Michael Mackenzie and Gillian Tett | London

Financial Times - Moody’s Investors Service fired off a warning on Wednesday that the triple A sovereign credit rating of the US would come under pressure unless economic growth was more robust than expected or tougher actions were taken to tackle the country’s budget deficit.

In a move that follows intensifying concern among investors over the US deficit, Moody’s said the country faced a trajectory of debt growth that was “clearly continuously upward”.

Steven Hess, senior credit officer at Moody’s, said the deficits projected in the budget outlook presented by the Obama administration outlook this week did not stabilise debt levels in relation to gross domestic product.

I was very pleasantly surprised at the excellent discussion that my last Mexico post inspired.

But there were some basic factual misunderstandings I need to clear up.

1) The Mexican Drug Cartels control the wholesale HARD drug networks inside the U.S. It's not just marijuana, they control most of the methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine sold in this country. From Wikipedia:

The Mexican Drug War is an armed conflict taking place between rival drug cartels and government forces in Mexico. Although Mexican drug cartels, or drug trafficking organizations, have existed for quite some time, they have become more powerful since the demise of Colombia's Cali and Medellín cartels in the 1990s. Mexican drug cartels now dominate the wholesale illicit drug market in the United States. Arrests of key cartel leaders, particularly in the Tijuana and Gulf cartels, have led to increasing drug violence as cartels fight for control of the trafficking routes into the United States.

Mexico, a major drug producing and transit country, is the main foreign supplier of marijuana and a major supplier of methamphetamine to the United States. Although Mexico accounts for only a small share of worldwide heroin production, it supplies a large share of the heroin distributed in the United States. Drug cartels in Mexico control approximately 70% of the foreign narcotics that flow into the United States. The State Department estimates that 90% of cocaine entering the United States transits Mexico—Colombia being the main cocaine producer—and that wholesale of illicit drug sale earnings estimates range from $13.6 billion to $48.4 billion annually. Mexican drug traffickers increasingly smuggle money back into Mexico in cars and trucks, likely due to the effectiveness of U.S. efforts at monitoring electronic money transfers.

2) No one wants to legalize marijuana because there is no money in legal marijuana. That goes for American farmers who grow the stuff, local American dealers, high end retailers, everyone. Anyone can grow high quality marijuana virtually anywhere. The canard that we could legalize it and tax it for considerable government revenue is just that, a canard.

3) The American War On Abstract Concepts that began with the "War on Drugs" and morphed into the "War on Terror" is financed to no small degree by the huge volumes of hot cash that are coming from drug transactions and the tax dollars that are diverted to paying for the DEA, CIA, ATF, FBI, Homeland Security, TSA, Customs, Border Patrol, Immigration, etc. The private prison industry is another big winner. There is far far too much money in "fighting drugs" for the American Info-tainment Prison Military Industrial Complex to give up. Not to mention the fact that the really savvy long term planners in that industry realize that we'll be forced out of the land wars in Asia business in less than a quarter century and will need to maintain a brisk level of military intervention in Latin America to have any pretext to maintain an enormous, and enormously profitable war machine. With communism gone, we desperately need drugs to justify meddling in our neighbors' affairs.

The populist winds are definitely a-blowing:

Bradbury, who served as the Oregon Secretary of State after many years in the state legislature, said that in the third quarter of 2009, the state put $330 million in taxpayer money into large national banks such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, and Bank of the West. "We sent $330 million to them and didn't get any benefit in terms of real lending activity with our medium and small businesses."

$330,000,000 is not chump change. Proposals like this will certainly get the banksters' attention.

I got an email from someone very upset with the things I have said about India. Here's the email in question, my reply is below:

Mr Kelley: I would appreciate it if you could let me know how long you spent in India and if you made any friends there. Looking at the photos of your trip you obviously enjoyed it-Lions of Gir, Rajasthan an' all that but your observations as per your subsequent writings showed that you did not really like India or Indians.. To me you are like the 'alternate' who goes to Kolkata, looks around for a hotel for $4 a night, eats at the roadside eatery, gets hash cheaply, dresses like an Indian with Kurta and/or Dhoti and then heads off to Benares or Rishikesh or wherever for a 'Spiritual Experience' After the great trip, which is duly notched up against a claim that will be made in the future "I have been 'Everywhere' etc" . On your return to America, after seeing emaciated rickshaw pullers, it would have been comforting to see the well fed obese compatriots and was time to jot down those memories, while still fresh, of observations like the 'shitty' hotel you stayed in (no mention of room price) lack of hot water-rats-cockroaches-pavement dwellers-corruption - on and on and on ad nauseam.

More after the jump.

I wrote an ongoing review of Andrew Ross Sorkin's tale of the financial crisis a few weeks back. My big complaint was that he didn't really bring any analysis to the table:

In the end, that's all the book is: a giant book filled with gossip. The narrative of the Banking Crisis is just a device giving Sorkin the chance to show us all how foul mouthed those bankers are. (As if we didn't know this already?) The real weakness is this, however: Sorkin had a chance to really analyze what went wrong but fails. He's not Lowenstein nor is he Eichenwald. Having read Sorkin at The New York Times for a few years, this makes sense. Sorkin is about access, not about analyzing and challenging the conventional wisdom.

Well, I stumbled upon a book a few days ago by John Lanchester, who usually writes for the London Review of Books. You might remember him, as I posted a comment of his about two years ago noting that it was by far the best take on the crisis so far.

He has a new book out called I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's an easy read. Human but analytical. A macro treatment of the banking crisis but interspersed with lots of very revealing anecdotes. Buy this book. You will not be disappointed.