The Subprime Solution
By Robert Shiller
Princeton, $16.95

Yale University’s Robert Shiller is one of the world’s outstanding economic thinkers and intellectual innovators, with a record of foresight that is the envy of his profession. Against the run of expert commentary, he correctly predicted the bursting of the stock market bubble at the start of this decade. Again in a small minority, he accurately forecast the collapse of the US housing market. His short, snappy and surprisingly far-reaching book on the subprime crisis is as interesting and indispensable as you would expect.