Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street

"A sweeping account of financial calamities . . . shows how often we've been wracked by crises, and how quickly we forget why, setting up the next one." -Mark Zandi, Chief Economist, Moody's Analytics

In the 1930s, battered and humbled by the Great Depression, the U.S. financial sector struck a grand bargain with the federal government. Bankers gained a safety net in exchange for certain curbs on their freedom: transparency rules, record-keeping and antifraud measures, and fiduciary respons...