A perfectly on target book by an academic who really nails it. The oft cited, and incorrect, reason for the economic meltdown (even cited by pseudo-liberal and former Reagan Administration guy, Paul Krugman) was too much household debt, when, point of fact, it was the awesome amount of debt created by the banks, hedge funds and private equity firms by their ultra-leveraging, selling endless financial instruments [credit derivatives] based upon layer and layer of debt. Daisy chaining their financial instruments [one bank sells a credit derivative and marks it on the liability side, the purchaser marks it on the asset side, then generates their own credit derivative based upon that asset, and on and on and on] dramatically increased the creation of debt, resulting in years of deleveraging. Hence, their austerity drive to force poverty on the rest of us.