Book twenty-six: Boomerang by Michael Lewis

This should be required reading for everyone. Lewis, the writer Moneyball and The Blind Side, succinctly summarizes the various stages of the recent financial collapse that took out some of the world's largest banks and which effects are still being felt throughout the world. Iceland - basically a bunch of newly educated fishermen start borrowing more and more to buy inflated prices. Greece - where apparently no one pays taxes and everyone is for themselves. Ireland - with an extreme housing bubble. Germany - who relied so heavily on the ratings system they continued to lend money long after they should have. And then there's us in the good old U.S. - with our culture of instant gratification.

"The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death... It's a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences... Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design bad loans."

26 down plus 26 to go.