The media tells us that ‘deregulation’ and ‘unfettered free marketplaces’ have wrecked our economy and will continue to make things worse with out a heavy dose of federal regulation. But the actual blame lies somewhere else. In Meltdown, bestselling writer Thomas E. Woods, Jr., unearths the true causes in back of the collapse of casing values and the share market-and it turns out the culprits reside even more in Washington than on Wall structure Street.

As well as the trillions of dollars in federal bailouts? Our politicians’ ham- about Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Authorities Bailouts Will Make Things Even worse handed attempts to fix the problems they themselves produced is only going to make things much worse.

Woods, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and champion from the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Prize, busts the mass media myths and federal government spin. He clarifies how government intervention in the economy-from the Democratic hobby horse called Fannie Mae to affirmative action programs just like the Community Redevelopment Act-actually caused the casing bubble.

Most important, Woods, writer of the New York Occasions bestseller The Politically Wrong Guide to American Background, traces this latest boom-and-bust-and most such booms and busts of the past century-back to 1 of the most revered authorities institutions of most: the Federal Reserve System, which allows busybody bureaucrats and ambitious politicians to draw the strings of our financial sector and manipulate the worthiness of the very money we use.

Meltdown, which includes a foreword by Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), also provides a well-timed history lesson to counter-top the existing clamor for a new New Deal. The Great Depression, Woods shows, was just as deep and as long as it was due to the government interventions by Herbert Hoover (no free-market capitalist, despite what your senior high school background teacher may have trained you) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (no savior of the American economy, in spite of what the mainstream media says). If you wish to understand what triggered the economic meltdown-and why non-e of the big-government solutions getting tried today will work-Meltdown points out it all.