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

Thirteen Bankers describes the control that bankers have managed to btain over our current financial system. It begins with a history of banking and moves towards the "innovation" that has occurred in banking. Only a few generations ago, banking was a relatively low paying conservative industry. However, bankers introduced more and more complex instruments that allowed them to make more and more money. Bankers are also heavily involved in the regulation of banking, making it difficult to implement some needed regulation. Big banks have also become "too big to fail" The government's willingness to let institutions fail at the start of the 2009 financial crisis ended up "forcing" the government to bail out the remaining banks. There was a huge liquidity crisis that could not be resolved. The perverse impact was that the big risky banks end up getting bigger, while the small diverse banks were wiped out. "Too big to fail" banks take riskier and riskier bets because they know they can get bailed out.