Finance, Schelling Points, lost causes, reading more than the abstract, urbanization. Married to the former Foursquare Mayor of the Union Square Babies-R-Us
At one level, this is an excellent history of how the modern mortgage market was born, and the role bailouts played in making it happen and fixing early mistakes. But it's also a great history of how the entire concept of banking changed to accommodate the growth of mortgages: historically, bankers did not make long-term loans, and mortgage loans were either made by rich individuals or by life insurance companies and other entities with long-duration liabilities.
Tyler Cowen bites many bullets in this book, arguing that big businesses are more efficient than small ones, that they're no less trustworthy than people (and—credit to Mitt Romney—they are made out of people). The book is a good intuition pump; it doesn't suggest that we should have policy preferences in favor of big companies, but does show that there are important tradeoffs in making the biggest companies smaller.
Chalmers Johnson's MITI book is great on the rise. On the decline, Holy Grail of Macroeconomics is a coherent theory but I'm not 100% sure it's right. I don't know a great book on what the peak/crash was like, but Devil Take the Hindmost has some good stories in one chapter.
Great thread on the backstory of Japanese housing
