Johan Norberg’s Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis has been named one of the best books of 2009 by the Spectator, Britain’s most important political affairs magazine. Excerpt:

Ever since the crash, I have been waiting for Johan Norberg to write about it — and finally, this year, he has obliged. I have three copies of his first book, In Defence of Globalisation, with varying degrees of annotation. I have already started to deface Financial Fiasco, his book showing how governments created this mess. The American government pumped up the housing bubble — and then there was a collective delusion that the market was rational. As Norberg says, the market is no more than a collection of humans who fall prey to hubris. And their hubris was imagining that computer models had eliminated risk: that the boom would not be followed by a bust.

It previously got an excellent review in the Financial Times. It’s enough to make you think that the elite British press are smarter than the elite American press.