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

The desire to analyze the current economic downturn has prompted a deluge of books, most focusing on how to address present and future economic ills and some narrowly focused on individual players and institutions that played a key role in the financial collapse, while others explained the events that led us to this place. "13 Bankers" explains how we got here and more importantly comes up with ideas to prevent a recurrence in the future far more concisely than many others I've read. I could be easy to dismiss Johnson and Kwak's observations as being pessimistic, as makes a very damning indictment of the banking and financial sectors in their past and present conditions and a rather trenchant argument that if these problem are not addressed we likely face another imminent meltdown. The authors give readers a quick concise history of finance and banking in the United States, something that many Americans are woefully unaware of, that points out how banks and financial institutions came to garner so much power over the economy. While efforts have been made to regulate them to varying degrees those regulations have often proven ineffective or are too often enacted AFTER financial catastrophes, much our current situation. The authors rather persuasively argue that the "too big to fail" model and the bailouts of 2008 and 2009 were misguided, arguing that nationalization would have been the better route to go. They continue the argument that the forced mergers, such as Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, were mistakes and instead had created institutions that are now truly to big to fail. In some respects it almost sounds like a Teddy Roosevelt-era trust buster and his argument that these large institutions need to be broken up to diffuse their power certainly makes sense. They also point out the corrosive effect their political clout and donations carry with the political process, hindering further efforts at regulation.

Ultimately "13 Bankers is far more satisfying a read than some recent books on the subject such as The Road from Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top, On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street, and America, Welcome to the Poorhouse: What You Must Do to Protect Your Financial Future and the Reform We Need. Yet the sad truth is that while the authors make a compelling argument for change the political establishment in Washington lacks the political will to break up these excessively large institutions. It wouldn't be good for THEIR business, which is getting reelected. While there are efforts afoot in Washington at reform none are as radical a surgery as proposed here, but suffice to say when the next financial catastrophe comes, and the authors argue it IS coming, there is unlikely to be any taxpayer/voter support for ANY bailout in ANY form. If anything "13 Bankers" made me mad as hell and against any future bailout, let alone continuing the current ones in place. What makes me madder still is that the politicians in both parties will likely never consider the radical proposal put forward here. It's a shame that it will take another financial crisis to get Congress and the Executive Branch to really act responsibly.

13 Bankers takes us through he painful history of the financial crisis that brought us where we are today and that now makes it so hard to move forward. Simon and Kwak argue that absent reform, another bailout - a more costly bailout with even greater global consequences, millions of jobs lost, and a ruinous impact on our government budget - is unavoidable.

Many Americans apparently do not yet understand how much influence financial institutions have in Washington, DC. Banks used to answer to Washington and were once held accountable for their actions. That is no longer is the case. We have never had such a concentrated banking system in the United States and it's dangerous that so much of our financial future is wrapped up in the big banks.

But the book is not pessimistic. Simon and Kwak offer instances from our history when elected representatives took on concentrated financial power. Each time, most Americans initially did not grasp how the system works, and this proved a major obstacle to reform. But the political leadership was able to explain what needed to be done, and to persuade average Americans that the nature of power in and around the financial sector had become so great and so distorted that something major had to be done.

The book is not anti-finance, but it is very much against the way our biggest banks operate today. The book describes exactly what needs to be done so that what happened in 2008-09 will never be allowed to happen again. Let's hope the prescription works.

I'm jumping in here more to vote among the opinions already expressed than to say anything new. I mostly agree with Bruce Lasker. The book is a good straightforward history of how we got to this point in American banking, but is neither deep in its analysis nor strong in its recommendations. If the reviews had been split on this issue I wouldn't have bothered, but since its 9 to 1 against Mr. Lasker, I think it's worth making it 9 to 2.

The opinion in this book is all expressed through word choice. When the authors don't like an increase in lending it is "an orgy of lending." When they do, "banks responded with capital to support growth." People they disagree with "rant," while people they like "point out" or even "prove." But there's never any analysis to back up these opinions, they're painted onto what is basically a factual history. I happen to agree with more than half of their views, but if I didn't, I wouldn't have been convinced by this book. It doesn't help that everything is based on secondary sources, from which the authors take what they like and nothing else.

On the other hand, if you want a factual history, and either agree with the authors or are willing to ignore loaded words, this is an excellent choice. It's well-written, witty, up-to-the-minute and accurate. The opinions are never intrusive, and never foolish. They feel concentrations of banking power are dangerous, which is pretty reasonable, but they ignore the problems caused by the local corruption that grew up in its place. You learn about Jefferson, Madison and Jackson's principled objection to national banking, you won't learn about politicians anxious to create local bank monopolies for their friends and associates, restraining competition in order to maximize profit and control local economies.

You'll learn how deposit insurance and limits on deposit interest reduced bank failures for 50 years, but not how it destroyed middle class savings when high inflation combined with low legal ceilings on interest; you also won't see the terrible customer service that existed until a "shadow" banking system made an end run around the regulations and offered ATM's, high-interest money market accounts, 24-hour-banking, automated deposits, Internet banking and other innovations (when I started working you got a paper paycheck every two weeks that you had to take to a physical bank on your lunch hour as they were open only 9 to 3 on weekdays and the tellers took the same lunch hour as the office workers so you didn't eat lunch on payday, no food allowed in the bank). Sneaky overcharging and predatory lending loom large in this book, with no hint of the advantage to customers when fixed commissions were smashed or companies were forced to improve accounting disclosure.

Wall Street is always the villain, local banks that lend only to their boards of directors and pals and support the local political machine, are whitewashed. The entire S&L crisis is blamed on Wall Street sharpies taking advantage of sleepy local bankers, you won't hear that virtually the entire loss was from commercial lending by oil-patch banks whose strong political connections ran through Texas, not New York. You'll read how Wall Street money flooded into Washington in campaign contributions and lobbying, you won't read about extortion from politicians introducing legislation to expropriate people's financial businesses unless they paid up. You also won't read about the constant movement of financial innovators to get away from the whole messy business of power politics, organizing off-shore, using private vehicles and leaving regulated businesses to come up with better solutions. It's always politicians trying to draw these into the regulatory framework, where they are forced to render unto Caesar, it's not financial innovators lining up to buy political backing for their ideas. Even the harm done by the gigantic financial institutions built entirely by Washington is blamed on Wall Street, not Washington.

I'm not defending Wall Street here, just pointing out there are two sides to the story. Wall Street, and more generally global financial innovation fighting entrenched local traditional practices, has done both good and bad. Mostly it does things that some people will consider good and others will consider bad. The one point of strong agreement I have with the authors is that a system of crony capitalism grew up, and led to a lot of our current problems. Personally, I would attack all crony capitalism, not just financial, as killing it in one place just tends to encourage it to spring up in another. We have crony defense contractors, medical companies, agribusinesses among many others. I grant that financial cronies are more dangerous than the others (except maybe defense contractors) but they are more alike than different. And the fundamental reform has to be political. If someone is handing out government money, it's pointless to outlaw taking it, because someone will always find a way to break the law, and then repay the giver. Stopping the handout is the point.

This is another book on the recent economic crisis. The shelf is pretty full of such books already, but this one is nonetheless well worth reading for several reasons.

First, Johnson and Kwak's analysis of the crisis is unusualy well done. The broad outlines of what wrong, at this point, are pretty well agreed upon. The collapse was caused by the preceding bubble. The bubble was caused by the Fed keeping interest rates too low for too long, and by Wall Street taking on far too much risk, and far too much leverage. Wall Street did this, because it was both effectively unregulated by the government and "too big to fail." In other words, Wall Street could do what it liked, knowing that Uncle Sam would pick up the tab if things went wrong. Naturally, since they got the profits, but the taxpayers got the losses, Wall Street went nuts pursuing profit in extremely risky ways.

This view has been put forward by many writers, and it is basically correct Johnson and Kwak do an unusually fine job, however, of getting the facts right and the details correct. They have really done their homework, and it shows. If you compare this book to another fine book, Barry Ritholz Bailout Nation, for example, they have far more details of the story of how Wall Street became effectively deregulated. Bailout Nation tells the same basic story, but Johnson and Kwak have more factual back up.

Second, Johnson and Kwak are the only writers on this crisis that I have read who intelligently use history to provide context to the story. Bailout Nation tries to do this, but Ritholz just does not know the history well, so he makes a hash of it. Johnson and Kwak actually know the history, and they provide an intelligent discussion of the clash over banking policy, starting with Hamilton and Jefferson, continuing with the battle between Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle and then coming down to the 20th century. This is very useful and needed context. In this old, old historical debate, they take an intermediate positon. In their view, Hamilton and his followers were right in an economic sense; big government which supports business, they feel, is better for the economy. But, they argue, Jefferson and Jackson were right in a political sense; government supported big business creates a rich elite, which gains too much power, subverts democracy and twists policy to serve its own ends. I do not entirely share this view; I think a case can be made that Jackson had a sound economic policy. At the same time, though, Johnson and Kwak perform a very valuable service by stressing the difference between economics and politics, and insisting that this issue has a huge political component, which it certainly does.

Third, Johnson and Kwak use the recent history of financial crises in developing nations to give some very interesting insights into our crisis. Paul Krugman tried to do this in The Return of Depression Economics, but I did not feel that he ever really explained why the crisis in Thailand and Korea was relevant to our situation. Johnson and Kwak cover the same material, but they explain very well the relevance of these past crises. As they explain, developing nations get into trouble due to the excess power of financial elites closely tied to the government. Our pattern is a bit different, they argue, but not as different as we would like to think; they argue with force that more or less the same thing just happened here. Their argument on this point is subtle, nuanced and extremely well put.

Fourth, Johnson and Kwak have a different policy suggestion that do most writers. They say: smash up the big banks. As they see it, the problem is that the banks are too large and too powerful. They subvert democracy and twist policy. They hold the country ransom by causing huge crises which force the government to choose between bailing them out and letting them destroy the economy. To stop this, say Johnson and Kwak, the best answer is to break up the big banks into smaller pieces.

I am glad to see somebody starting to advocate for some really forceful responses to this crisis. I think it is just amazing how little has been done to Wall Street, after all the harm that it caused to us. Personally, I think that breaking up the big banks is a good idea, which would be helpful, but I do not think it really gets to the heart of the matter. With all of their stress on politics, I think that Johnson and Kwak are a bit weak on the economics side. After all, smash them up is basically just Andrew Jackson's policy brought to modern times. It solves the political problem of an elite having too much power. It does not, however, solve the economic problem of a repeating boom and bust cycle. After all, after Jackson destroyed the 2nd Bank of the US, the boom-bust cycle continued. So, while I have sympathy for Johnson and Kwak's anti-Wall Street feelings, I think that we need to probe a bit more deeply to get to the bottom of the economic side of this pattern.

Simon Johnson is ubiquitous, appearing on a wide range of shows (at least those I watch such as NPR, PBS, and HBO). He is wonderful to listen to, a guy filled with knowledge (as well he should be since he teaches at MIT). And he has a sense of humor. And he is not one with a "conspiracy theory" which apparently one "reviewer" (one-star one) claims. So when I heard about this book, I had to read it.
I grew up in the home of a banker. But Dad was a small-town bank president in what we call "community banks." And the bank still exists and is doing well in Vermont. But my dad, when he retired in the early 70s, said, "Banking isn't banking any more." I had no idea what he was talking about, mainly because I was never much interested in banking. But I have become quite interested in it now that this country has become economically handcuffed by these so-called bankers.
This is a very well written book with a very comprehensive set of notes (footnotes) at the end. In other words, anyone writing comments about these authors being conspiracy theorists is simply ignoring the content of the book. Having said this, however, I want to acknowledge that the book isn't written for people who don't have at least a little knowledge about how the world of finance works. In other words, I found myself lost in many places. But I cannot fault the writers or the writing. I simply don't have what we English teachers would call "prior knowledge," the essential tool to reading.
The authors are not bashing anyone. The book is structured so the reader is provided with some history (and it is sourced history) before being presented with what happened and how it happened. I like how objective Johnson and Kvak are. To use a phrase that I captured from a cable channel I would never watch, this is "fair and balanced."
What most interested this reader is the case the writers make for "The American Oligarchy." Indeed that is what we have with these "financial elites" that run Wall Street. They are so tightly tied into our non-functioning Congress (and to some degree a too-tied-to-Wall-Street White House and to five very-tied-to-Wall-Street on the Supreme Court).
I intend to give this book as a gift to a few people I know who really need accurate information. But do "tea baggers" read I wonder.