Other People’s Money

Charles V. Bagli, who broke the news of the sale as a New York Times reporter, follows the purchase of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in New York City, on which Tishman Speyer and BlackRock, its partner, lost billions of investors' money in just over three years. He uses that single deal to explain the causes of the real estate crisis. The book asks how the Church of England, California's public employees' pension fund and the government of Singapore lost more than a billion dollars between them on a middle-class housing complex, how MetLife made $3 billion from the sale, and how nine residents won an unlikely lawsuit.

Vinod Khosla judged it close to the truth about the financial services industry and said it was still worth reading, though he felt the author's biases show.