13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown

US: Pantheon, 2010. Hardcover. Very Good+/Very Good. Even after the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, America is still beset by the depredations of an oligarchy that is now bigger, more profitable, and m ore resistant to regulation than ever. Anchored by six megabanks--Bank of A merica, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan S tanley--which together control assets amounting, astonishingly, to more tha n 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product, these financial insti tutions (now more emphatically "too big to fail") continue to hold the glob al economy hostage, threatening yet another financial meltdown with their e xcessive risk-taking and toxic "business as usual" practices. How did this come to be--and what is to be done? These are the central concerns of 13 Ba nkers, a brilliant, historically informed account of our troubled political economy. In 13 Bankers, Simon Johnson--one of the most prominent and frequently cite d economists in America (former chief economist of the International Moneta ry Fund, Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT, and author of the controvers ial "The Quiet Coup" in The Atlantic)--and James Kwak give a wide-ranging, meticulous, and bracing account of recent U.S. financial history within the context of previous showdowns between American democracy and Big Finance: from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, from Theodore Roosevelt to Frankli n Delano Roosevelt. They convincingly show why our future is imperiled by t he ideology of finance (finance is good, unregulated finance is better, unf ettered finance run amok is best) and by Wall Street's political control of government policy pertaining to it. As the authors insist, the.