Though this blistering book identifies many causes of the recent financial crisis,
from housing policy to minimum capital requirements for banks, the authors lay
ultimate blame on a dominant deregulatory ideology and Wall Street's corresponding
political influence. Johnson, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and
Kwak, a former consultant for McKinsey, follow American finance's rocky road from
the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton over the first Bank of the United States
through frequent friction between Big Finance and democracy to the Obama
administration's responses to the crises. The authors take a highly critical stance
toward recent palliative measures, arguing that nationalization of the banks would
have been preferable to the bailouts, which have allowed the banks to further
consolidate power and resources. Given the swelling size of the six megabanks,
the authors make a persuasive case that the financial system cannot be secure until
those banks that are too big to fail are somehow broken up. This intelligent, nuanced
book might be too technical for general-interest readers, but it synthesizes
a significant amount of research while advancing a coherent and compelling point of view.

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