By: Larry MacDonald

Plenty of gloomy books have appeared on the current financial crisis and various aspects thereof. I found 13 of them (as listed below) a few weeks ago while digging around for some summer reading. I was tempted to read several of them — but as it turned out, some work assignments came along and cut into the time set aside for leisure reading. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to immerse myself too deeply in any more bad tidings than what was already coming out in the news. It’s been plenty enough on its own.

1. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, Kevin Phillips
2. Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis, Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla
3. The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, Charles R. Morris
4. The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008, George Soros
5. When Markets Collide, Mohamed El-Erian
6. Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Richard Bitner
7. Financial Shock: A 360º Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, Mark Zandi
8. Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future (Revised and Updated Edition), Michael J. Panzner
9. Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve, William Fleckenstein and Fred Sheehan
10. The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel, Stephen Leeb and Glen Strathy
11. Buy Gold Now: How a Real Estate Bust, our Bulging National Debt Will Push Gold to Record Highs, S. McGuire
12. A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, Richard Bookstaber
13. The Collapse Of The Dollar And How To Profit From It, James Turk