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There are roughly two kinds of books written about the financial crisis, much as there are two broad reactions to events that culminated in the implosion of 2008: There are those that view the events as an intricate historical tangle that needs to be combed through and understood, and that tend to see ignorance, failure, error and ambiguity as presiding deities over a systemic crisis. In this approach, few escape complicity; the game is to discriminate between greater and lesser evils. Then there are the books that make a more focused argument for an eternal war of good and evil, for a more political and more moralistic perspective. Terrible events presuppose the presence of terrible people and terrible decisions. Malefactors must be punished. All history culminates in disaster and has to be judged by that disaster. These books tend to feature powerfully simple arguments, full of characters wearing black hats and white hats. In the former category fall books as disparate as Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail” and Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s “All the Devils Are Here.” In the latter case, we have Simon Johnson and James Kwak’s “13 Bankers” and the long-awaited dissection of the mortgage crisis from The New York Times‘ Gretchen Morgenson and Graham Fisher & Co. mortgage analyst Joshua Rosner, “Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.”

The title of Morgenson and Rosner’s book fully captures the thrust of their argument. It’s about ambition, greed and corruption — not intellectual error, a failure of understanding, incompetence and cosmically bad luck mixed with greed and corruption. It’s not about breakdown or failure, but “Armageddon.” It is thus a highly moralistic tract that argues that the subprime crisis, literally and figuratively, stemmed from a group of powerful men who deliberately turned housing finance in the United States to their self-interested ends. It argues that the mortgage “bubble” was at the heart of the crisis, and that other issues from easy Federal Reserve money to trade imbalances to globalization to overwhelming systemic complexity to financial innovation were either secondary or beside the point. This point of view allows Morgenson and Rosner to simplify the complex evolution of mortgages to what they view as an illicit takeover of the business and recast the two big mortgage government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as the necessary ignition of implosion (they don’t explain how the crisis spread internationally).

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