Michael Corkery’s summary and excerpt, provocatively titled “Break Out the C-4: New Book Say Let’s Blow up Wall Street,” are based primarily on the final chapter of the book, where we discuss financial regulation and the need to break up large banks. He focuses on one of the main proposals in that chapter — size limits for financial institutions. There’s a lengthy excerpt that includes the basic proposal and a discussion of some of the issues it raises. We didn’t intend that section of that chapter to be the final word in that debate; the goal of the book was to describe the problem we face and begin to sketch out a solution. But it’s a fair snapshot of our thinking on the topic.
Corkery gets one thing a little bit confused: he links the title of the book to a meeting with Larry Summers in 2008 on the topic of the bank bailouts during the recent financial crisis. The title’s primary reference is to a meeting between Barack Obama and thirteen bank CEOs in March 2009 (there is a secondary reference to a meeting with Summers back in 1998). We knew the title would be a little cryptic, but since the book is about to come out, we’ve spelled out the reference on a new page of this site.
Filed under: Excerpts |
13 Bankers 