I had a very weird initial experience with Busted: When I got the galley a couple of months ago, I for some reason started reading in the middle. Before long I was sincerely puzzled: Did the New York Times really pay so poorly that Ed and his also-gainfully-employed wife couldn't make the mortgage payments on a $450,000 house? Then I leafed back a few chapters and saw the reasons: divorce, alimony, child support.

This time around I started at the beginning, but was soon confronted with Ed's decision to volunteer for duty in the Times's Baghdad bureau and its dire consequences for his first marriage. If I tried something like that without months and months and months of spousal consultation, banishment to the basement would be about the mildest punishment I might expect. (And I live in a Manhattan apartment building, where moving to the basement means moving in with the super.)

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Actually I did. Ed didn't tell me that he was thinking of taking out an Alt-A loan, but I did try to warn Ed and everyone else in sight about the housing bubble. We even ran an essay contest offering $1,000 for the best essay arguing that there was no housing bubble which got written up in Ed's newspaper (twice). Needless to say, Ed didn't listen, but more importantly Alan Greenspan and the other great minds in the economics profession didn't listen.

Ed will have to deal with his loan officer, but what about all the other folks who somehow could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble expanding in front of their face? What sort of economic system do we have when you can drive your bank into the ground peddling these garbage loans and still have a job the next day?

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Thanks for the invitation to discuss Ed Andrews' Busted. By way of introduction, I'm an editor at Newsweek, where I've covered the housing boom and bust, and I wrote a book called House Lust that chronicled the irrational exuberance over real estate during the first half of the decade.

I read Busted a few weeks ago in a single sitting. The author's personal story is really gripping and drives it along. Unlike most of what's been written about the housing meltdown, there's a story to Busted, and I stayed up ridiculously late because I wanted to find out how it ended. While Andrews' disintegrating finances (and, notably, its effect on his new marriage) form the heart of the book, he's filled out the story by exploring the supply chain of his loan. (This is the other two-thirds of the book he mentions in his introduction.) While these sections are less compelling than his personal story, I admired the imaginative way he managed to take what is essentially a really good magazine story (ie the excerpt that ran in the Times Magazine) and fill it out to create a book.

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Thank you so much for inviting me to the Cafe. I've had a wild ride over the past month, ever since the New York Times Magazine published an excerpt of Busted, in which I recount my own outrageous nightmare with junk mortgages. This book has been the ultimate hot-and-cold experience. Hundreds of people have written to thank me for laying out my own mistakes, with many expressing relief that they weren't alone and that they didn't feel quite as ashamed of the mistakes they had made. I've never experienced such an outpouring of anguish and sympathy. Most came across as sincere and hardworking family people, not me-too gimmie-gimmies. Most acknowledged they had made mistakes and just wanted to get back to a sound footing -- with or without their houses.

But obviously, I've also been on the target of much righteous wrath and vitriol. I've been called a loser, a liar, a fraud, and an example of what's wrong with America. Among many other epithets. That was to be expected. When you're a lead economics reporter for the Times and you admit to bungling your finances so badly, you waive any claims to mercy. What I didn't expect was to be accused of not falling on my sword enough and for leaving out "crucial'' information about my wife Patty's prior financial problems. This kicked off a mud-storm in the blogosphere, though book reviewers and interviewers have generally viewed it as a sideshow. But it's all fair game, and I invite people to weigh in or ask questions.

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Edmund Andrews, economics reporter for The New York Times, joins us at TPMCafe Book Club this week to discuss his book Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown.

From Ed's introductory post:

Although the narrative is anchored on my own personal experience, the goal is to explore in intimate detail the broader corruption and cynical recklessness that infected players at each level of the financial food chain. Two-thirds of the book is not about me but about the people who helped deliver all that money to my door: my lenders, the Wall Street guys behind them and the Washington policymakers like Alan Greenspan.

Joining the discussion are Dean Baker, Cafe regular, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Justin Fox, TIME's economics and business reporter and author of The Myth of the Rational Market; Daniel Gross, senior editor at Newsweek and author of Dumb Money: How our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation; Daniel McGinn, national correspondent for Newsweek and author of House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes; and Nathan Newman, Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network.