Editor’s note: Tell me if you’ve heard this before: “the financial system is ruining our democracy”. Right, me too. But Foroohar is not the Thomas Picketty or Tragic Idealist take, whose solutions are neo-socialistic such as redistribution of income. Foroohar offers five solutions in the last chapter and while they’re a bit idealisitic, they are fairly precise such as #1: Reduce complexity and leverage. I believe we will wake up one day, whether thoughtfully or rudely and return to a more traditional capitalism, using banks to finance investment, debt and long term growth. Financial firms will return to products that aid the creation of goods, services, innovation, research and advancements rather than engineered financial products that simply move debt around. In the meantime, I’ll continue to worry.
Excerpt: “…there is reason to worry whether the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 will actually do to make our system safer because the law itself is incredibly complicated. Dodd-Frank is 2,319 pages compared to Glass-Stegall, which separated investment banking from commercial banking in just 37 pages.”