This well-assembled group of brief essays on the 2008 economic crisis and the resulting Great Recession provides a pithy and rigorous summary of those very complicated and universally influential events. The Danube Institute in Budapest is not an especially well-known source of opinion in the English-speaking world on such matters, but this ambitious undertaking gives close to a 360-degree view of the issues raised by the debacle of 2008 in less than 100 pages. The well-known and well-traveled John O’Sullivan, the former editor of National Review and comment editor to the London Times and London Daily Telegraph, the New York Post, and the National Post of Canada, and head of the Voice of America in Europe, contributed a rather learned but still very comprehensible introduction on the creation and growth of the U.S. housing bubble, the sudden bursting of which almost brought down the world’s banking system. Mr. O’Sullivan well records how the American political community, from left to right, immediately came to the consensus that the private sector was the cause of the problem and more regulation was needed.

Though John O’Sullivan does not labor these points, the political class was uniform in its views of the cause, after the incumbent President George W. Bush’s ungalvanizing tocsin: “The sucker could go down,” referring, rather complacently, to the economy, and as if he bore no responsibility for this condition. The financial community, much less monochromatic and fast on their feet than the politicians, fumbled