A concise, effective overview of primary financial phenomena leading to 2008-09’s Global Financial Crisis. Short chapters outlining how index investing undermines diversification, for example, serve as object lessons in how the financial markets came to be dangerously correlated and newly sundered principals (investors) and agents. Many of the early topics (e.g., carry trading, decline of banks / rise of money market funds) benefit from the author’s writings in the

Financial Times

; some of the latter efforts (e.g., quants or ‘politics and institutions’) are less satisfying. Wisely, the details of the subprime housing collapse and subsequent credit crunch are left to others. Mainly a very fine effort that falls down only in the (perhaps inevitable) diminished historical perspective of some latter parts.