This book analyzes in a new way the causes of the current crash by showing how such events derive from real estate bubbles and their interactions with banks and other lenders.

• Analyzes the current crisis of the real estate crash and explains the recurring cycle which led to it
• Examines why frequent assessments are crucial to making the property tax an effective method of preventing speculative real estate bubbles
• Combines theoretical analysis with observed cycles of land speculation to demonstrate the impact on the modern economy

Mason Gaffney has been a professor of economics at the University of California, Riverside for the past 33 years. He is the author of The Corruption of Economics, an explanation of how land became excluded from neoclassical economic models. He has also written extensively on various aspects of resource economics, urban economics, tax policy, and capital theory.