Surviving the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time
Dave Kansas has written "The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It: What You Need to Know About the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time -- And How to Survive It" (Collins Business).</br></br>For the Color of Money Book Club selection for March, I recommend you read Kansas's book, which at $15.99 is a bargain look at how we came to be in what I call the Millennium Meltdown.</br></br>Kansas is an experienced financial journalist who has covered the good, bad and ugly of the financial markets. He's editor-at-large for FiLife, an online personal finance Web site. He spent four years as editor of the Wall Street Journal's Money & Investing section and was once editor-in-chief of TheStreet.com.</br></br>"We're experiencing a moment when nothing and no one feels safe," Kansas summarizes in the book's introduction. "People are understandably frustrated and angry. . . . It is a time of high anxiety with moments of panic arguably not seen in this nation since the Great Depression, even if the present circumstances don't exactly mirror the calamity of that age."</br></br>Part of the reason we're fuming about our financial state is that we were hoodwinked. We were told not to worry because Wall Street wanted us to win. So, in good faith, we invested. We invested our money in retirement plans or college funds hoping not necessarily to become Rockefeller rich but to earn a decent return.