Overview

Lie, swindle, steal. It's another day at work for the sales professionals of the mortgage industry. Amid the wreckage of the S&L scandal, a group of maverick entrepreneurs hatch a new money-making scheme: writing 'subprime' loans at exorbitant prices and bundling them into securities for eager Wall Street banks. In this stunning narrative, award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson brings us inside the boiler rooms and banks that flooded the nation with high-risk, high-profit mortgages. At Ameriquest Mortgage, the nation's largest subprime lender, salesmen sniff out homeowners vulnerable to refinancing pitches, and use Wite-Out to doctor documents. At rival FAMCO, employees memorize 'The Monster', a high-pressure sales tactic crafted to obscure interest rates - and so unscrupulous that one loan officer calls his state attorney general. With support from Washington bureaucrats and Wall Street, subprime grows into a $1.5 trillion behemoth - devastating the lives of millions of homeowners and wounding the U.S. economy. Provocative and gripping, ""The Moster"" is a searing tale of a sales culture gone out of control and the bottom-feeding fraud and topdown greed that fuelled the financial collapse.

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9780805090468

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A chilling account of the subprime-loan scandal. . . . As appalling as it is informative, Hudson's tale, which hasn't ended by a long shot, should find a large readership. -- Booklist Hudson is a master of context, supplying the pre-1990s history within the mortgage-lending business, Wall Street and the government-regulation realm. A knowledgeable, clearly written expose. - Kirkus Reviews Mike Hudson is a terrific journalist and an even more engaging writer. The Monster is as captivating as it is deep, not 5,000 feet but 10,000. The book is a down-to-the-bone account of the genesis of the financial crisis and paints a visceral picture of the structural deficiencies in our financial system. Lehman Brothers failure is 10x Enron and 100x Long Term Capital Management. We cannot afford not to learn from the valuable lessons in this book. --Lawrence G. McDonald, co-author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Insi Magnificently and heartbreakingly told. . . . What I appreciated most about this tremendous, well-documented book is that it shows vividly that really filthy, face-to-face fraud and hard-sell bullying are the original ingredients, the required counters, in the increasingly abstract financial instruments that brought the economy down around our ears. -- The Boston Globe Whereas much of the reporting of the economic meltdown has been focused on Wall Street, Hudson has a talent for describing what was happening on the ground. He takes us on a tour of the financial carnival tent pitched by subprime factories like Ameriquest... Did some people borrow beyond their means? Certainly. But as Hudson demonstrates, the public was no match for an industry that lived off deceit fueled by Wall Street. -- Time Magazine As engagingly written as Michael Lewis' The Big Short (which chronicles the struggles the winners endured during the last bubble), as caustic and trenchant in its analysis of the dotty economic theories that underpin our bubble economy as Yves Smith's ECONned ; and at least as cogent of the big-picture power politics as Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers , The Monster also does what those books don't: It reveals the inner lives of both the victims and the perpetrators of predatory lending. -- Baltimore City Paper Hudson's book is a guide to the worst excesses of the mortgage business . . . [and offers] a deeper, truer understanding of the many-headed subprime monster. . . . [ The Monster ] succeeds by entertaining us with behind-the-scenes moments and personal stories from people trading their ethics for all-expenses-paid trips to Hawaii. -- The Seattle Times Terrifically readable. . . . Hudson gives readers piercing insight into the booze, broads and cocaine that fueled the buccaneers in the mortgage game. . . . Though I thought myself too old to be shocked, the revelations here shocked me. Read it and weep. -- Chico News & Review Michael W.

“A chilling account of the subprime-loan scandal. . . . As appalling as it is informative, Hudson’s tale, which hasn’t ended by a long shot, should find a large readership.”-- Booklist  “Hudson is a master of context, supplying the pre-1990s history within the mortgage-lending business, Wall Street and the government-regulation realm. A knowledgeable, clearly written exposé.”— Kirkus Reviews   Mike Hudson is a terrific journalist and an even more engaging writer. The Monster is as captivating as it is deep, not 5,000 feet but 10,000. The book is a down-to-the-bone account of the genesis of the financial crisis and paints a visceral picture of the structural deficiencies in our financial system.  Lehman Brothers failure is 10x Enron and 100x Long Term Capital Management.  We cannot afford not to learn from the valuable lessons in this book. --Lawrence G. McDonald, co-author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Insi

Author Information

Michael W. Hudson is a staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit journalism organization. He previously worked as a reporter for the ""Wall Street Journal"" and as an investigator for the Center for Responsible Lending. The winner of a George Polk Award, Hudson has also written for ""Forbes,"" ""The Big Money,"" the ""New York Times,"" the ""Los Angeles Times"" and ""Mother Jones."" He edited the award-winning book ""Merchants of Misery"" and appeared in the documentary film Maxed Out. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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