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...