It’s an author’s dream to write a book foretelling a crisis and then, as the work is published, to have the very disaster the writer has forecast—bridges collapsing, businesses going bust—actually strike.

Something akin to this authorial bliss must be overcoming Charles R. Morris and William A. Fleckenstein, who are the first to come out with books related to the subprime-mortgage meltdown. Morris, the author of 10 other books, argues in The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash that the mortgage bust is only the beginning. Subprime-mortgage failures, he writes, are but “the first boulder in an avalanche” of coming credit disasters.

Fleckenstein, a money manager and regular stock market blogger, focuses on Alan Greenspan, the now unhappy former Fed chairman. Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve places much of the blame for the mortgage meltdown—and just about everything else that has gone wrong on the planet—on Greenspan’s alleged easy-money policies.

Both books are breezy and informal and suffer from a certain hyperbolic zeal. Though Morris assures us that his book is not a quickie, it has that feel because he pads it with too much background (everything from the 1970s oil embargo to killings at rock concerts) before presenting some very trenchant chapters on the mortgage collapse. As for Greenspan’s Bubbles, the tone of the whole book is conveyed by the title of the first chapter, “How Wrong Can One Man Be?”

Morris does not ignore Greenspan; he sees him as merely one of many contributors to a long and gradual erosion of credit standards. The root cause, Morris argues, is the ideology advanced by Chicago-school economists who favor curtailing regulation and allowing the free market to work. Their ideas were probably a useful corrective when they began to influence federal policy in the 1980s. Morris notes that at the time, the economy was indeed suffering from too many controls. But as so often happens, the cure mutated into a new disease. Free to work their sorcery, mortgage bankers, credit-rating agencies, and Wall Street eventually blew a trillion dollars. Thus, Morris writes, the capitalists turned out to be no more brilliant than the bureaucrats: “There is no benevolent market genie behind the curtain.”

Morris cites three especially harmful trends. The first is diminished regulation. The second is that in the Wild West market that came to characterize the mortgage industry, lenders quit caring about the quality of their loans because they were lending to flip, not hold. Third, Morris fingers what he calls the “dangerous” practice of letting mathematics dominate investment decisions, especially in the mortgage pools that are now failing.

These points seem spot-on, and much in the recent headlines makes Morris look prescient. But his book does not have the finished quality of his previous The Cost of Good Intentions (a superb study of the failure of liberalism in New York City). Rather, here, his prose is occasionally overheated, and he wanders from his subject into such barely related terrain as the issue of wage inequality.

But all told, Trillion Dollar Meltdown is a good first take on the mortgage debacle, and it sets forth some astute policy prescriptions. To give one example, Morris says loan originators should be made to share in any eventual losses suffered by retail lenders and others down the line. After a quarter-century of deregulation, he sensibly concludes, “it’s time for the pendulum to swing in the other direction.”

Fleckenstein’s thesis—that Greenspan “wasn’t the only reason there was a bubble, but without his sponsorship it could never have grown anywhere near as large or as dangerous as it did”—is fair. Otherwise, his book is almost a smear. This is not to say that the author lacks chops. He repeatedly depicts a “maestro” whose judgment was, sadly, off. Fleckenstein and co-author Frederick Sheehan shrewdly begin by recalling that during his pre-Fed career as a private consultant, Greenspan nonchalantly told federal regulators that they needn’t fret over the freewheeling savings-and-loan industry—which was, of course, headed for catastrophe. This sets us up for a recurring theme in Greenspan’s career at the Fed—his infatuation with deregulation.

Fleckenstein focuses on Greenspan’s seeming tolerance of the twin bubbles (internet stocks and housing) of the 1990s and ’00s. His enthusiasm for technology blinded him to the fact that dotcom valuations were, to put it plainly, insane. Greenspan did see the housing bubble coming and alluded to it as early as 2002. Nevertheless, he lowered the federal funds rate to a four-decade low of 1 percent and kept it there, with the full support of his eventual successor, Ben Bernanke, as part of a quixotic mission to ward off deflation. Fleckenstein argues that Greenspan was out of touch, and I think he’s right. The threat of deflation was hypothetical; housing inflation was real. And with interest rates at their lowest in 40 years, Greenspan advised consumers to take advantage of adjustable-rate mortgages—the monthly payments for which soared when, in short order, the Fed found it necessary to start raising rates.

After a few more similar examples, coated with Fleckenstein’s none-too-subtle judgments (“As was often the case with the chairman, he didn’t have a good grasp of what was taking place”), we start to think of Greenspan as a bumbler, someone who was almost stupid. And then we realize how one-sided this account is. Contrary to the author’s contention, the majority of Greenspan’s decisions were not “absurd” or obviously wrong. Central bankers make difficult decisions under great pressure. Rarely is it clear to anyone which way rates should go, nor is the issue of pricking bubbles a simple or settled question among the world’s currency controllers.

Worse, Fleckenstein ignores the little matter of the 18 years of, for the most part, prosperity under Greenspan’s watch. It is fine to argue that given the possibility of our current economic woes, the Fed chief should have halted, or at least restrained, the good times sooner. It is another thing to pretend that they didn’t exist.