The U.S. stock market is wrapping up its worst week ever. More than 12 million American homeowners are now underwater, stuck with mortgages worth more than their homes. And the pain is global: The credit freeze is causing cargo to pile up at shipping ports around the planet as banks refuse to accept letters of credit guaranteeing payment. The nation of Iceland is bankrupt.

Investigative journalist and “News Dissector” Danny Schechter has been on top of the impending — and now arrived — economic crisis, as demonstrated by his new book, Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, recently published by Cosimo. In the book, he explains the origins of the crisis and lays the blame at the feet of those who knowingly engineered it.

And the word is spreading. The Economist mentions Plunder alongside other books such as The Subprime Solution by Yale professor Robert Schiller, The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs by leading investment expert Charles Ellis, and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, in a piece called “Read it and Weep: The Banking Bust and The Book Bubble.”

Schechter has been making numerous appearances in the media to talk about Plunder, the financial crisis now playing out, and the possible solutions:

• NPR’s program On Point (listen to the program here)

• Laura Flanders’ GritTV, on which Schechter and others put the current financial crisis in its historical context:

• The Real News:

Read the introduction to Plunder here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.