The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street

Following Ronald Reagan’s obsession with the “radical deregulation” of financial markets through its apotheosis under the Clinton administration to Obama’s reform efforts—which rely, oddly enough, on Clinton cronies to clean up (and profit from) the mess they made—Scheer (The Pornography of Power) proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows. Scheer names names (Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Alan Greenspan), while praising those who sounded the alarm and underscoring the foreseeable results of putting Wall Street in the driver’s seat. What grew in this regulatory vacuum, Scheer shows, was a global “casino,” a mind-bendingly enormous and arcane system of gambling on new financial products worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. By 2007, when the house of cards collapsed, Wall Street alone understood what it had wrought while its government partners remained clueless. (Oct.)