Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street

by Neil Barofsky

In telling of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush & Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In behind-the-scenes detail, he shows the extreme degree to which government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the public—& at the expense of effective financial reform. During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky gave up his job as a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office in NYC, where he'd convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives & mortgage fraud perpetrators, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of bailout money spending. From the first his efforts to protect against fraud & to hold big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts.

Barofsky discloses how, in serving banking interests, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner & his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs to would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms & would have allowed them to game the markets & make huge profits with almost no risk or accountability, while repeatedly fighting efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG & Geithner’s decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses & that the Obama administration’s TARP Czar lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay.

Providing details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners & the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner & his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief program pointed out by bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who wouldn't have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction ($1.4 billion when he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial system totaled $4.7 trillion. As he raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction. He recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street the political system is & why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger & more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, History, Business, Finance, Audiobook

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 21, 2010

Reviews

[William Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Behold, Neil Barofsky is the Second Coming of Christ! Witness as he is led into the temple and overturns the money-changers' tables! Watch as he is nearly crucified in Columbia! Gaze at the pinnacle of moral superiority in a corrupt world!

Jesus H. Christ. This book is nothing more than an autobiography of Barofsky's life over the last 10 years or so. It is not, as billed, a history of, nor a socio-political analysis of, nor a thorough examination of the bailouts it claims to be. Instead, what we get here is Barofsky trying to clear his name for posterity and so that history cannot label him a monster in the wake of this catastrophe. It's basically 300 pages of him trying to cover his ass and martyr himself while redirecting all blame to a myriad of other Capitol Hill players.

What irked me most about this book? The fact that Barofsky plays the doe-eyed babe-in-the-woods here, just a plain old guy getting ground to dust by the bureaucracy, and appalled by the immorality of those around him. If we are to believe Barofsky, he is the pinnacle of morality, not only in DC, but in NYC and any other place he sets foot. Wherever he goes, he walks on water. Not only that, but before becoming the GIC of Oversight for TARP, he only ever worked for people who were as moral as he and could teach him to be even more righteous.

Now, any man working as a lawyer in a major metropolitan area, or for the federal government, cannot be, by definition, a babe-in-the-woods. Not the lost and wandering naive man he claims to have been. The man openly admits to taking on the largest drug cartel in the world. Does this sound like a country bumpkin that doesn't know his way around a big city? Poor Neil, you were just a straw man, weren't you. Poor baby. But wait. That's not right. You were a shark when you were dropped into the oversight job. Don't try to play dumb with us.

The gall of this man just burns me up. On top of that, there isn't even enough actual information about the bailout in this book to fill a New Yorker article, let alone this book. Anything reported in these pages has been public knowledge for years now. It isn't anything you can't find out from CNN reports or the NYT. But, if you want to know more about the martyred Second Coming of Christ, the moral apex of the US and the end of a political career trying to be saved for posterity, well then go right ahead and read this, Neil Barofsky's autobiography.

[Athan Tolis · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much fun as you can possibly have finding out about the inner workings of government.

Not much, then, but still an awesome account. This is a book about two friends who took on the Washington establishment and lost. But they won enough battles along the way to make this a fun read.

Neil Barofsky had a very strong background to become the inspector general of TARP. However, he took a bit too long to realise TARP was but a thinly veiled vehicle to shore up the capital of America's biggest banks and their trading counterparties. Thankfully, this made him even more determined to act.

So him and his deputy spent a long time fighting the good fight and gave their best. There's good guys in the book and there's villains. But the author recognizes that everybody has a role and most were acting in a manner consistent with their principles. He bemoans the manner in which Neil Kashkari stonewalled him, for instance, but fully recognizes that they simply came to the problem from a different angle.

An exception is made for Tim Geithner, who is not profiled in a terribly flattering way, but that is starting to be rather consistent in the literature that surrounds the bailouts. That said, the author (a Democrat) leaves the door open to the notion that Geithner may have been doing the dirtywork for the White House. We'll never know.

My beliefs are not aligned with the author's. I have sympathy for the Neil Kashkari argument that "all money is green" which seems to give Neil Barofsky the hives and I most certainly don't share in the author's pity for all the guys who took out a mortgage they could not afford on a house they could not afford. On the other hand, of course, I totally agree that the whole idea behind TARP and the deference given to the banks was an abomination. And the author's account leaves zero doubt in my mind that the public was horribly misled by HAMP and the rest of the programs. Finally, as a citizen I've found from the horse's mouth that (contrary to the stories I've read in the paper) TARP did not make the advertized returns.

But that is not the point at all. I thoroughly enjoyed the book because it is a deep, insightful and fascinating account of how Washington works. To get an account like that you need a guy who's been there, who's managed to get out and who has the gift of writing well.

Neil Barofsky scores on all those fronts. He lays out the history, he presents the characters and keeps developing them during the story, he has a good laugh and managed to force plenty out of me too. He took the job seriously, did it as well as he could and thankfully he got a chance to tell us about it.

I've read a good five books on the bailout, from Stiglitz to Sorkin and this is the one I'd recommend to my dad if he asked.

[Frank Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best descriptions of Washington I have ever read.

To start off I have to say that, despite the title, the least interesting parts of the book are actually those in which Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), describes the intricacies of how the Treasury, under both Bush and Obama, shoveled more money to undeserving firms, granted banks unnecessary tax privileges, and exacerbated the foreclosure crisis with poorly designed programs like HAMP. Thanks at least partially to Barofsky's work as SIGTARP, from whence he provided oversight for the $700 billion dollar bank bailout, those stories have been told many times before.

What is truly original here is Barofsky's insightful and refreshingly honest look at Washington machinations. This is not a tale of grand corruption, of unmarked bags of cash and under-the-table briefcases that Oliver Stone or some other director would have us imagine. This is instead a story of how pettiness and childish ceremonies of power and privilege corrupt the personalities of those who work in a constantly political world. Unlike most strivers in DC, though, Barofsky seems remarkably immune from "Potomac Fever," and thus keeps a sharp eye for the ridiculous protocols that define a place that remains foreign but fascinating to him. He and his deputy, who both came to DC from "the Office," the US Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York, are always rushing to each other to explain the newest hilarious strategy by Paulson or Geithner to undermine whomever they've decided to oppose for the moment.

For instance, at one point a Treasury employee stops Barofsky in the hall to claim that Elizabeth Warren "really hates him," and is really jealous of him, something he knows is not true since he just talked to her, but that someone in Treasury clearly thought it was worthwhile tto mention in order to drive a wedge between the two of them. Such high-school rumor mongering in fact seems ubiquitous here, and is nearly always traced to someone at the top carrying out some scheme. Another kind of sabotage was even less subtle. After assigning SIGTARP the worst office in the Treasury building, one that reeks of eggs and fish, a classic Washington put-down, Secretary Paulson goes farther by making it almost impossible for SIGTARP to acquire garbage cans. Instead they have to collect their own garbage and pile it up on cafeteria trays. Of course government regulations prohibited them from acquiring any cans for months without putting out bids, UNLESS they acquired them from other government agencies, who therefore knew to descend on his office like door-to-door salesmen to sell him everything from over-priced printer toner to cheap chairs. He and the reader had to wonder, where did they get all this stuff to sell?

Through the madness, though, Barofsky keeps his perspective. The one point where you think he may have lost it, when he starts fuming over the fact that an "acting" agency head gets to speak before him at a congressional hearing, against the established-speaking hierarchy, his wife points out to him that he is finally beginning to absorb the Washington atmosphere, and it is then he decides that he has to resign. The reader has to be relieved.

There's lots of other great little Washington tidbits here. How he gets given $50 million dollars to set up an office but can't hire anyone for months because of government regulations, or how the mis-titled Paperwork Reduction act causes a scuffle between him and the White House that forces him to go through Congress and the press to get a typical waiver. So if you want to know why Washington is different from almost every other place in the country, this is the book to go to.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though by now we know most what Neil Barofsky packs into his book, Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, it remains worth reading as an in-depth, consolidated account of how the Bush and Obama administrations pretended to be supporting overwhelmed home owners while pumping hundreds of billions into America's top-heavy "financial system," led by big banks that have only grown since they helped generate the deepest recession we have known since the Great Depression.



Barofsky was a deputy U.S. attorney in New York when he was asked, though a Democrat, to become Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). He didn't want to accept; he didn't see himself in Washington; he didn't like Washington…but he was given a God and Country speech and he succumbed.



For the next 18 months or so, he entered the bowels of the Treasury Department and the hallways of Congress, trying to ensure that the $800 TARP kitty did its job for U.S. taxpayers.



He soon realized that Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and his successor, Tim Geithner, weren't focused on homeowners or taxpayers. Their concern was the likes of JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, CitiGroup, and so on.



Economic historians will long debate whether this unstated focus was essential to preventing global financial collapse. But what's clear from Bailout, and lots of similar reporting, is that the little guy--Not Too Small To Fail--took it on the chin as the megabanks grew, their debts were honored, and their executives richly rewarded for soaking up Treasury's largesse in the form of gigantic bonuses.



In one sense Bailout is a personal tale. Barofsky recounts being patted on the back and kicked in the shins; he retells stories of his Treasury and White House colleagues lying about him for political advantange; and he is open about his anger and disdain without losing his sense of humor.



So this is a readable book, almost a fun book. But there are two additional dimensions of Bailout I would highlight.



First, it's a pessmistic book despite Barofsky's wit and innate optimism. It takes us inside a huge financial crash whose origins have not yet been addressed. We are still at the mercy of banks and other "nonfinancial" institutions making risky, greedy bets that force us to save them or bring down the whole house of cards. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law that was supposed to address this problem didn't do so. The bad guys and their lobbyists won. Wall Streeters tell us that we may have been smart enough to see them with no clothes on a few years ago, but they're still better at forecasting the financial future than we are…lots better…despite all evidence to the contrary. So we should regulate them lightly and shrink them not a bit.



Second, back in the days of the Cold War, there was a term, moral equivalence, that came up in the context of global debates about who was truly evil, capitalists or communists. I thought about that term last week as I sat through a presentation Barofsky made, recounting his early days as a prosecutor focused on Colombian narcotraffickers and then his latter days as an inspector general trying to combat misguided policies and outright crooks in the US financial sector (which has laundered a lot of drug money, by the way.)



I asked him if he saw any equivalence between drug lords and Wall Street lords. He said no, the drug lords were violent beasts (true) and the Wall Street lords, while some were crooks and convicted for their crookedness, often were geniuinely persuaded of their patriotism, or at least not torturers and kidnappers.



This was an equable response, a fair response, an indication that Barofsky could see different points of view, even when he was in disagreement. But I wonder about the misery and humiliation and family destruction experienced at the hands of Wall Street lords by millions of Americans. I've been in the room with both the tiny and the titans. The titans are not, as far as I've seen, four hundred to a thousand times more critical to the nation's economic welfare than average workers. They're not that much smarter. They're just lucky, crafty, and full of self-righteousness.



A nonfiction book like this, when written from a personal perspective, provides lots of fiction-like insight. Bailout is a standout in this regard because Barofsky, by Washington standards, is one of the most open, unguarded truth-tellers I've come across (I've been in and out of Washington for thirty years).



My favorite anecdote is Tim Geithner, who managed not to pay a few years worth of taxes due to a statute of limitations, being asked if he had made any mistakes in implementing the $800 billion TARP fund.



Geithner replied: "The only real mistake that I can think of was that there were times when we were unnecessarily unsure of ourselves. We should have realized at the time just how right each of our decisions were."



Wow. Pure idiocy. Barofsky and others have documented in extenso Geithner's misjudgments, questionable maneuvers, and failed policies and programs. Guess Geithner was too busy being right to read about how wrong he was.



Final note: We're a fabulously rich country. If $800 billion isn't well spent or on target or doesn't meet the needs of the hardest hit, I suppose we can survive. The deeper problem is moral. Can we survive the judgment of our leaders that shoring up out-of-control financial institutions and their obscenely compensated executives is more important than doing right by Main Street? Can we recover trust in a government that happily misleads us as its top officials prepare to scamper through the revolving door from Washington to Wall Street? And what about the permanent politicians in Washington who serve at the pleasure of the plutocrats? These realities are demoralizing; they erode the foundations of a strong democracy.



Barofsky concludes that he wrote Bailout in anger. It's a good book. It hits hard. It tells the truth. But I still wonder about the moral equivalence question. How did we end up with not only banks that are too big to fail but also bankers too big to jail?



For more of my comments on contemporary books, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).

[Eric Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A non-ideological look at how the bailout was a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to Wall Street banks (assisted by both administrations' Treasury Departments) that vindicates equally the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, written by the top official in charge of policing fraud in the bailout program. The conclusion says it all: "I now realize that the American people *should* lose faith in their government. They *should* deplore the captured politicians and regulators who took their taxpayer dollars and distributed them to the banks without insisting that they be accountable for how the bailout money was spent. They *should* be revolted by a financial system that rewards failure and protects the fortunes of those who drove the system to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly do so again. They *should* be enraged by the broken promises to Main Street and the unending protection of Wall Street. Because only with this appropriate and justified rage can we sow the seeds for the types of reform that will one day break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabanks."

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This distressing book, authored by the former Inspector General in charge of overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program that followed our last depression, is easier to read than one might think, Barofsky nesting his discussion of economic issues in an engaging narrative description of his years in Washington, D.C.

What one learns, overall, is that national politics is substantially dominated by the largest financial institutions. This was as true during the Bush administration as during Obama's--no great surprise given the primary sources of the latter's campaign financing. In the end, Congress will do nothing unless a mass movement more powerful than the Tea Party or Occupy forces their hand.

[Bart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book. TV's HBO ought to amend the end-phrasing of "Too Big to Fail" where they state TARP funds have been repaid and instruct Sorkin to write Treasury's 'criminal' acts into the story line of his new "Newsroom" series. The US Treasury ought to be dismantled by revolution as they represent an extension of the worst kind of human nature and a deadly sin. There is no long-term strategy in a democracy of election cycles where only the legal and banking systems persevere and the legal system is made toothless by bureaucratic proxy.

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was a major component of the US government's response to the Great Recession. Created during the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration, TARP's primary goal was to offload toxic securities from various institutions. TARP would then recoup once these institutions were back on their feet. When TARP was created, a special investigator general (SIGTARP) was created to act as a watchdog during the program's execution. Neil Barofsky, a prosecutor from New York, was chosen for this position. Bailout is his own account of his time as SIGTARP.

It's very interesting, and infuriating, to read this book. Not to sneer at other components of his account, but the hook, so to speak, is the recounting of various meetings and interactions with the US Treasury, Congress, and other members of Washington. Specifically, it was particularly painful to read about the SIGTARP office being ignored time and time again when it came to best practices or special measures that should be taken when handing out taxpayer money. A lot of times, you got the impression that the SIGTARP office was nothing more than a formality, and that the US Treasury was always going to simply do what it wants.

I didn't notice while reading (because it was exactly what I wanted to hear) but in hindsight a healthy skepticism is required when reading this. This is just Neil's side of the story and that becomes obvious once you finish reading and see that he comes out on top of every account in his book. I would not be surprised if this book's primary motivation was to set a public narrative that absolved him of SIGTARP's ineffectiveness. Still, based on nothing but intuition, I mostly trust his account.

One thing I took note of was that Neil never ascribes someone's actions to malice or greed. He always frames it as simple ignorance. I think this is to avoid liability. Truthfully, I think a lot of these people simply acted in a self serving nature and knew that their choices weren't in the best interest of the people. Regarding TARP, many people immediately spout "It made a profit!" while disregarding what I believe to be Neil's theme. That it was indeed necessary but, as it was carried out, TARP sets a terrible precedent for the American people. It disrupts the natural flow of our own economic system. Risk is one of the core tenets guiding the 'invisible hand' and TARP effectively nullified that for large institutions. More importantly, that risk doesn't just vanish. It gets taken off these institutions and handed down to us. A real trickle-down effect in action.

[Eric Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neil Barfosky is a former Manhattan prosecutor who was appointed by President Bush to oversee the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008. For the next 3 years he battled a corrupt and compliant government and willing financial industry. “The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Barofsky later told reporters. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

As you can probably tell from the previous quote, Barfosky has the type of attitude that you want in a public official, especially one who is charged with overseeing large amounts of tax payer money. He doesn’t give a shit about private interests. He only cares about the public’s.

One of the worst clichés in writing is to refer to anyone who challenges power as the next “Hunter S. Thompson.” I won’t make the comparison, because Barofsky isn’t Hunter S. Thompson, and he also doesn’t try to be. Instead he wrote an important and readable book on the most pressing issue of our time: government corruption.


Random Segment from the book I enjoyed:


I now realize, though, that Treasury’s dismissal of our warnings has produced a valuable byproduct, the widespread anger that may contain the only hope for meaningful reform of our system. I now realize that the American people should lose faith in their government. They should deplore the captured politicians and regulators who took their taxpayer dollars and distributed them to the banks without insisting that they be accountable for how the bailout money was spent. They should be revolted by a financial system that rewards failure and protects the fortunes of those who drove the system to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly do so again. They should be enraged by the broken promises to Main Street and the unending protection of Wall Street. Because only with this appropriate and justified rage can we sow the seeds for the types of reform that will one day break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabanks. It is my own anger that compelled me to write this book, and I hope that in some small way it can help put us on that path.

This review was first published on my website. Thanks for reading.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Barofsky, a young prosecutor in the New York U. S. Attorney's office, was drafted to be the Treasury's Inspector General of the TARP funds. His book details his idealistic approach to his work, his initial naivete about the ways of Washington and the motivations of many of its denizens, and his efforts to cut through the misinformation, foolishness, and outright lies of the agency he monitored. Clearly, he brought to the table an intelligence, toughness, and sense of responsibility that few others would have, and many of his accomplishments helped shed light on some very poor decisions and practices at Treasury. His disrespect of senior Treasury officials, including most specifically Secretary Geithner, is deep and well-justified.
Still, there is nothing in the narrative about how and why Geithner made his decisions, and what pressure he was under from Obama, Summers and others. Therefore, Barofsky's story begs the question of who was really calling the shots which he is rightly decrying. Other books have explored this question, and it seems pretty clear that Geithner was way over his head in his job, and if one connects the dots, most of responsibility for the failures of TARP and the whole bailout process which Barofsky catalogues probably can be laid at the feet of the President and his advisors. No assessment of Geithner which I've seen leads me to believe he was doing -- or was capable of doing -- much but trying to stay afloat. Small wonder that Barofsky, a straight shooter, was so upset by what he saw, but a shame that he wasn't in a position to see the whole picture.
I don't agree with all Barofsky's positions (for example, he's not persuasive in dismissing moral hazard as a serious issue when thinking about whether to modify mortgages for underwater borrowers), but for the most part he's on the money. The story he tells is interesting, well-written and extremely damaging to the Obama administration in general and the Treasury Department in particular.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was at times very dry, and I also wondered from time to time why Barofsky thought his point required an entire book... but I still found it a worthwhile read.

Whether we realize it or not, the government bailouts affected everyone in the United States, and a good amount of the people around the world. That does make it important, I think, for people to have at least a shallow understanding of the forces that shape the economy and our financial system. I think more people should pay attention, but maybe that is just me.

My biggest annoyance with the book is that the author is still committed to reliance on the government after seeing first hand how ridiculous and corrupt all of the branches of government are. Any sane person should realize that the government was a huge part of the problem. While Barofsky admits that government has set up the financial system for another near-collapse, he looks to bigger government regulations rather than looking for a government that doesn't mess with this sh** in the first place. Once again... that's just what I think. I'll be over here pulling my hair out...

[Schnaucl · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're interested in the bailout rather than how we got into this crisis in the first place you should definitely read this book.

I've been doing a lot of reading about the crisis and the aftermath, but there was still a lot that was new to me. I hadn't realized just how disorganized Treasury was or how involved the White House was in covering Treasury's ass at the expense of the taxpayers.

Apparently the real purpose of HAMP wasn't to help homeowners at all, but to slow down the defaults to spread out the pain for the banks. That's why the modifications didn't reduce the principle and the modifications expire in five years.

I'd heard that Congress wanted to bail out main street but this book did a good job of actually showing it. TARP and other programs were approved by Congress because they were supposed to bail out main street and as soon as the bills were passed Treasury abandoned that aspect.

The fact that TARP funds were generally paid back with money the banks borrowed from different government programs is something I knew but that I wish was better known by the general public.

[Uwe Hook · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "Bailout", Neil Barofsky has contributed one of the more readable and focused critiques of Washington's response to the financial meltdown of the housing industry. As the first special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Barofsky brought a prosecutor's sensibility to the job, as well as a good understanding of the underlying motives (mostly greed) that led to the collapse of an important industry. His frustration with the Treasury Department's sweetheart relationship with the industry they are supposed to regulate sends a dispiriting message about the future of the economy in which regulators protect institutions deemed "too big to fail" and "too big to prosecute". I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in government.

[Swagdad69 · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is decent if you can get past the self-serving nature of Barofsky's recount. I could not. It is also a type of Schrodinger's non-fiction: both interesting and boring at the same time.

The Good: It gives great insight into the nature of the beast that is politics and bureaucracy inside Washington. Not only that, it does so during a fascinating time period. The book often reads like fiction, which makes the story relatively easy to follow along with, despite all the different agencies and individuals involved.

The Bad: Barofsky obviously takes himself very seriously and even though I'm glad there are people like that in government, the dude still comes across like a NARC. I think he should be proud of the work he did, but I found some parts tough to read as he patted himself on the back. Also, my current mood is that politics (the subject matter of the book) are lame and boring so maybe take my review with a grain of salt.

2/5 stars. 3/10 would recommend. Schrodinger's non-fiction.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this bracing, page-turning account of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Neil Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush and Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In vivid behind-the-scenes detail, he reveals proof of the extreme degree to which our government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the broader public—and at the expense of effective financial reform.

During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky gave up his job as a prosecutor in the esteemed U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York City, where he had convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives, and perpetrators of mortgage fraud, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the spending of the bailout money. From his first day on the job, his efforts to protect against fraud and to hold the big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from the Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts.

Barofsky discloses how, in serving the interests of the banks, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms and would have allowed them to game the markets and make huge profits with almost no risk and no accountability, while repeatedly fighting Barofsky’s efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG and Geithner’s decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses—including $7,700 to a kitchen worker and $7,000 to a mail room assistant—and that the Obama administration’s “TARP czar” lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay.

Providing stark details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners and the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner and his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief program pointed out by Barofsky and other bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who would not have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction (just $1.4 billion at the time he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial system—as Barofsky discloses—totaled $4.7 trillion. As Barofsky raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction of his investigations, and he recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street our political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book confirms my worst suspicions about the Wall Street bailouts. From the bailouts with few strings attached, to the Wall Street executives' billions in bonuses, to the AIG bailout paying the banks 100 cents on the dollar for CDS contracts worth about half that, Treasury always helped the banks at the expense of everyone else. Treasury continually resisted and stonewalled the efforts of the Special Inspector General (SIG) to protect taxpayers and limit the potential for fraud in the programs.

Thirty-five bailout programs represented a total commitment of $23.7 trillion in taxpayer backing! The actual outlay maxed out at $4.7 trillion in total. By July 2009 the outlay was down to $3 trillion but by July 2010 back up to $3.7 trillion.

In the design of the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) to purchase up to $2 trillion of “legacy assets” including residential mortgage-backed securities, Treasury kept SIG out of the process while working with BlackRock, the Trust Company of the West Group (TCW), and PIMCO which were investment houses who stood to profit from PPIP. Treasury resisted attempts by SIG to require a “firewall” between the PPIP fund managers and other departments in the investment company to limit its use to manipulate the prices of assets the company has in its other portfolios.

In the Home Affordable Modification Plan (HAMP) which was supposed to help 2 to 3 million homeowners modify their mortgages, Treasury allowed the mortgage servicers, owned by the big banks (three of the largest were owned by Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase), to take advantage of homeowners. Servicers make more profit from a foreclosure than from a modification. “They earn fees when borrowers are late on payments and charge for certain foreclosure-related services. Importantly for the servicers, when a home is sold in foreclosure, they are typically paid all their fees and advance expenses before the owners of the mortgagees get any of the proceeds of the sale... Though it may be better for an investor if a mortgage is modified, the servicer may be better off if a home goes to foreclosure.” A servicer may make the most if it drags out a trial modification for months then forecloses. It was a common practice for a servicer to “lose” the paperwork of a borrower's application as a pretense to foreclose. “A survey by ProPublica found that borrowers had to submit documents an average of six times – but the servicers would still claim that documents had never been received and then foreclose.” SIG discovered that contrary to the publicly stated objective of helping homeowners, Treasury's real objective for HAMP was to drag out the foreclosure process giving the banks more time to improve their financial position. “Treasury has not held any servicer responsible in even the slightest way for the widespread abuses of HAMP applicants, nor is it ever likely to do so.”

[Harry Lane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barofsky begins by establishing his bona fides, which are considerable. Before becoming the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, he worked as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. Among other accomplishments during his career there, he headed the Mortgage Fraud Group and successfully prosecuted a number of cases.

The structure of his narrative is essentially chronological, but along the way Barofsky points to a number of factors contributing to the financial meltdown. Among the most important are perverse incentives and lack of regulation. For example, much of the housing bubble resulted from the securitization of mortgages, such that the more mortgages a bank could originate and sell, the higher their profit. The incentive to do so thus became more important than the incentive to insure the borrower was a good credit risk. Similarly, credit rating agencies, whose ratings assured investors these instruments were relatively risk free were paid for their services by the very people selling those instruments. They therefore had a strong financial incentive to rate them highly. It seems clear also that those agencies which had some level of oversight authority, such and the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Fannie May and Freddie Mac, and the Treasury Department, failed to see the problem developing or to use the tools available to them to mitigate it. And, to be sure, some elements of the problem would have been difficult to address within the existing regulatory framework.

Barofsky's account of his attempts to get Treasury to build in appropriate controls and safeguards is depressing. He makes abundantly clear that the powers that were (and are even to this day) were totally focused on managing the crisis to keep the captains of finance from suffering any undue discomfort. He makes two telling propostitions. One, TARP and the actions of others involved in the bailout hugely benefited Wall Street, But did nothing for main street or homeowners. Two, even though the result saved the economy from going over a cliff, the failure to address the systemic problems simply means, as Barofsky put it, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car with faulty brakes.

An overarching lesson from this story, it seems to me, is that people and institutions whose business depends on trust have shown themselves unworthy of that trust. That so many people have been willing to engage in deceptive practices, some of which cross the border into outright fraud, is disturbing. Yet they seem to believe that they should be trusted to go on their merry way without systemic correction or additional oversight. That is even more disturbing.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I listened to the audio book and I would prefer to give it 1.5 stars rather than 2. The book is 75% about the author, Neil Barofsky, and his wife Karen and co-worker Kevin and how great they are and how they did such a great job setting up SIG-TARP and their office and navigating the inner workings of government and only 25% about the corruption of TARP and the federal government as a whole.

What astounded me are the following: 1) Barofsky had to pay $2,193.00 in 2008 for a Blackberry and that nobody in the private sector would ever pay that much for a Blackberry at that time and this is one of the reasons our federal government should not be allowed to manage our healthcare because it's corrupt and 2) of the nearly $800B in TARP assets the book detailed only about $50-$100M that they were able to identify as fraudulently used which is 1.25% or less of all the money spent 3) the money went to the banks rather than the people and the American taxpayer was fleeced yet again by the Political Ruling Class (e.g. Congress & The Senate and the President) and 4) I never liked Timothy Geithner from the start, I believed he was a criminal and in the back pockets of the big banks and Wall Street and this book proves it.

I definitely recommend this book, especially for those people younger than me, that just participated in our 2020 Election and want the government to provide free healthcare, a Federal minimum wage, and free college to every person in this country.

[Drew Mochak · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for any American. The obvious temptation here is to bog the narative down with rambling, unproovable he-said, she-said accounts of meetings wherein person X said to person Y a seemingly harmless phrase that, once you read another five books on the unspoken code of Washington politics, actually means something sinister unless it doesn't or he made it all up. Another common trope of "insider" wallstreet books is to obscure the issue with constant parades of data, figures, graphs and musings that can only be understood by someone who already knows what's being said, and is merely seeking self-affirmation. Instead, what's offered here is a frank, concise accounting of the facts, which are that the treasury department runs interferance for the banks, and in turn, the white house runs interferance for the Treasury department. Congress runs interferance for congress, and no one gives a shit about us. There are accounts of meetings and more off the record discussions with government officials but apart from the introduction they are brief, and only serve to underscore the central point of each chapter. Some of my favorite parts are what appear to be throw-away lines near the beginning, such as when the author received preparation advice on his confirmation hearing from Team Bush: "If you're asked a multipart question, just answer the part you want to answer and ignore all of the other ones. Most of the Senators don't really care about your answer and are just looking to get their question on the evening news. If someone pushes you, say you are not yet privvy to that information and promise to make it a top priority if confirmed." It's like how we imagine a generic evil power-hungry villain would act in a story accept it's all real and they run our government. Crazy. Anyways! This novel, unlike this review, covers the important events of the Wallstreet bailouts in a highly focused way, providing a nonpartisan account of both the Bush and Obama whitehouses and the differences between them--or, rather, lack thereof. The narative voice is rather frank, makeing an otherwise dry read very open and accessible to the average wage slave.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

1 star for the wooden prose and the incessant need to tattle on government officials who may have insulted the author during his role in Washington (Tim Geithner, Herb Allison, Eric Thorson, and many others) by describing instances of insults, profanity-laced conversations, and failure to be given the deference the author felt was his due mar the 5-star expose of how capitalism allows for the privatization of profits but the socialization of losses. The descriptions of the various programs our government attempted during the financial crisis are relatively well explained and the author does a fine job explaining his concerns over the potential for fraud that existed in the alphabet soup of programs the government created ad hoc during the financial crisis. He also gives a good sense of the difficulty one has in upsetting the way our government currently works and the politics involved in getting government workers (who ostensibly work for the public) to behave in an ethical, transparent manner. The common tripes of complexity, being afraid that companies wouldn't sign up for programs because they were afraid of vigorous oversight, etc., should upset even the most placid of the electorate as it is painfully clear that our government works for the benefit of corporations and business instead of consumers and the average voter. So although I think the book serves as yet another example of the disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country and gives a good personal account of the difficulties public advocates face while challenging entrenched interests, the pettiness of the author at being slighted during his time in Washington may have in fact impeded his opportunity to get even more accomplished in his role.

[Fraser Kinnear · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh wow, I did not know what I was getting into. I got this recommendation after hearing Anat Admati praise it to Russ Roberts on an EconTalk episode. This must be the most candid, authoritative, book on any controversial government policy program that I’ve ever read.

This is a book about the policy failures of Bush and then Obama’s Treasury Departments to administer TARP effectively. The author happens to be the man nominated by Congress to run a fully independent inspector general office that policed the TARP program. Barofsky was given the power to prosecute any fraud or graft that came about from poor administration of the $700 billion TARP. Barofsky was a ball-busting financial crimes prosecutor who had assassination attempts from the Columbian FARC under his belt, years of experience prosecuting mortgage fraud, and frequently explains to his reader how unconcerned he was about the long-term career ramifications he was for making enemies in DC. In doing so, he not only makes the case that he avoided the regulatory capture that he claims is so rampant in US government, but he even calls out individuals by name who he didn’t believe were behaving appropriately, all the way up to Tim Geithner.

Beyond being a fascinating outsiders’ perspective on how government oversight works, Barofsky’s criticisms of TARP’s various initiatives are detailed and compelling.

The first program CPP was $200 bn of preferred stock purchases of the major investment banks, and had virtually no restrictions on how the funds would be used. Congress had expected TARP’s funds to be used for buying the toxic mortgage assets directly and stem the wave of home foreclosures. They were obviously irate when the funds instead went unaccounted for into the banks.

Barofsky pushed for terms of TARP allocations to include a clean accounting by the recipient for how these funds would be used. Treasury hated this idea, and argued that money is fungible and couldn’t be accounted for. “I didn’t yet realize that the type of transparency that we were pitching risked exposing CPP as the pure bailout that it was.”

Also criticized was the intent and rollout of TALF, which Barofsky described as using “taxpayer funds to lure investors back into the consumer loan backed bond market by increasing their potential profits and limiting their losses.” Another program, P-PIP, which was a more extreme version of TALF that had even more risk of fraud and virtually no skin-in-the-game for private party investors. Fortunately, most of this was stamped out by the FDIC and the Fed, and < 6% of the $2 trn program was expended.

One of Treasury’s worst programs under TARP was HAMP, whereby Treasury delegated home mortgage modifications to loan servicers, who had the perverse incentive to see loans go into foreclosure (where they were the first to receive all of their fees in a bankruptcy) and stop having to service the loans at all, instead of modify them. Not only was it poor policy that created a lot of heartache around the country (Barofsky describes one example for context), but news of the program itself was what motivated Rick Santelli to make his tea party remarks that galvanized the tea party movement. Barofsky thought HAMP could have been administered far better, and should have also focused more in principal reduction than restructuring interest. This obviously would not have satisfied critics like Santelli, but Barofsky argues that it would have helped homeowners liquidate their homes without them being underwater. Later, when principal reduction became an option, Treasury allowed loan servicers decide whether or not to offer principal reduction (which would reduce the basis of their fees), or interest restructuring, which wouldn’t.

Barofsky actually claims that Treasury’s intention for HAMP was not to reduce foreclosures, but to spread the incurrence of foreclosures into the future, which would stabilize bank losses. This went against the intent of the TARP program, “HAMP was not separate from the bank bailouts, it was an essential part of them. From that perspective, it didn’t matter if the modifications failed after a year or so of trial payments, or if struggling placed into doomed trial modifications ended up far worse off, as long as the banks were able to stretch out their pain until their profits returned.”

Treasury’s modus operandi: “First, announcements intended to shock and awe the media that made for good soundbites, but were not particularly well thought out. Then, weeks later, scattered and incomplete details that had to be reworked on the fly. And finally, poor program execution that accomplished little, if any, of the originally announced goals.”

“The simple truth is Geitner and Treasury never chose to treat the foreclosure crisis, or their promises to congress to help homeowners, with the same seriousness and resolve that they applied to rescuing the banks. By the end of 2011, Treasury had only spent $3bn of the $50bn originally allocated to HAMP. In other words, nearly three full years after HAMP was launched, home owners had benefitted less from TARP than American Express.”

One adverse effect, famously, is the outsized bonuses awarded post bailout, including Treasury publibly defending the controversial $218 million of bonuses to AIG. “Compensation for the top Wall Street firms in 2010 actually broke records at $135bn.”

Criticism was not limited to Treasury. Barofsky has deep disdain for the various Federal Offices of Insepctor General, who are mostly concerned about keeping their budgets. In particular, ”Eric Thorson, who Barofsky describes as a “groveling” Inspector General for Treasury: “This type of capture, this type of utter subservience by the IG had become the expectation within Treasury about how an IG was “supposed to” act.”

Absolutely fascinating, now maybe I’ll finally read the Andrew Ross Sorkin that’s been sitting on my shelf for years to get the other perspective.

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will begin by saying that I was and still am against T.A.R.P.. With that being said, it was passed and we had it. Neil Barofsky is a Democrat and donated to the Obama campaign in 2008. He was nominated as Inspector General of T.A.R.P. by President Bush and was confirmed by both sides with barely any incident.

Barofsky nails it in this book. He starts by being critical of the Bush administration and then states that he is hopping that the new administration (Obama) and his appointments will be better in trying to create the atmosphere of corruption that would allow T.A.R.P. recipients to game the system. Those hopes were crushed by Timothy Geithner and his minions.


I am not saying the Bush and Obama were directly involved, but at a minimum, it makes them inept and indirectly responsible with what happens on their watch; especially something as big and egregious as this. Barofsky breaks down the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP), Public Private Investment Program (PPIP), roubled Asset-backed Loan Facility (TALF) and other boondoggles by our Federal Government. He describes in layman's terms how the system was gamed and by whom.

He describes encounters with Treasury officials, Congressmen, and Senators and how he informed them and warned of how the system could be and would be gamed. Those warnings fell on deaf ears.

Required reading if you are interested in what happened and worst yet, how the more things change, the more the stay the same. We are doomed.

[Donald Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barofsky was the Special Inspector General in charge of TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP was the government's response to the financial crisis that shook the international economic structure in the fall of 2008. Barofsky's first-hand account tells the story of his attempts to remain independent of politics and warn Congress and the Treasury of potential fraud in the distribution of the billions of taxpayer dollars targeted initially at helping homeowners but quickly redirected to helping the largest banks. When his warnings were ignored, his office was also in charge of prosecuting frauds resulting from the misuse of TARP funds.
One of the most eye-opening aspects of his account was his attempt to persuade the Treasury Department that banks receiving TARP money should have to account for how they used the funds. The initial response from Treasury was that banks could not be expected to track the taxpayer bailout money, because "money is fungible" and "all money is green." In spite of this roadblock, Barofsky pushed on and eventually received reports from banks on how they used the bailout. Since no strings were attached to the receipt of the money, most banks were not using the funds to make loans or to help homeowners, the original congressional intent.
The book helps the reader understand the depth of the problems in Washington. My only complaint about the book is its length, caused in large part by the author's style and his overly-detailed account of his personal life during his tenure in Washington.

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't realize when I started this book that Barofsky is some sort of politician (despite his feeble cries to be just an innocent ingenue who was seemingly randomly selected to be the head of a department overseeing a trillion dollar program). It clearly shows through. Knowing he's a politician, it's obvious that this book is not any kind of examination of bailouts or a history of the bailout - it's basically just an overview of why everyone in Washington is horrible except Neil Barofsky and the people on his side. Pretty shocking!

Even if you could take his claims at face value, there's nothing worthwhile or interesting in this book. Barofsky makes a big deal about saving hundreds of millions of dollars for the taxpayer - that sounds penny-wise and pound foolish to me, given that he's saving a few hundred million dollars out of 700 BILLION. That's like saying he saved us $1.50 off of a $10,000 bill. Who cares? Barofsky's sense of what people care about is obviously horribly skewed, since he has several parts in the book that sound like reprints of one of those bullshit press conferences politicians hold - "I should have realized that my choice of words would be taken as inflammatory in this context" - like anyone gives a fuck about your choice of words. Zero stars.

P.S. No one gives a fuck about your personal life, Barofsky, so we don't need to hear about how much you love your wife and how you had to put off your honeymoon or whatever.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Neil Barofsky overdoes it quite a bit in this book--both his role and the black and white position of the treasury and the President. But he sees the financial crisis as a prosecutor. While that viewpoint may or may not be clarifying, what the book does provide in rich detail is why it is a must read. Because NB basically writes the book like a journal, it's a great look into how Washington politics work, especially the interplay between Treasury, congress, and the IG's office. He writes to the layman here and writes about all the meetings and calls and power plays. That part is all very interesting. The Treasury comes off as the bad guy in the book with Geitner as its evil head. This depiction has been confirmed by others as well (See Sheila Bair's new memoir), but I did think that some of the portrayals of Geitner's positions to be a bit over-dramatic. It is clear from the book that NB did his best to bring accountability to TARP, which he describes as a disaster from its inception. The descriptions of what people in Treasury knew, but especially what they didn't know, is pretty eye-opening. NB does have some heros and because one of them is also my hero (elizabeth Warren), all is forgiven.

[Marcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an articulate,interesting, and well-written book about the TARP bailout which affected every person in the US as well as generations to come! Geithner and other bankers were so arrogant that they thought that the problems and big finance were too complex for ordinary people to understand. Wrong! Barofsky explains the basic problems and gives examples of the problems with TARP and other federal goverment programs. He contends that the programs were good ideas but did not contain enough specifics or penalties. Barkofsky quickly experienced the blood sport of politics within the Beltway. Power is everything! The author places the blame for the failure of the government bailouts squarely on Paulson and Geithner because the "buck stops" at the top. Paulson, Geithner, and others tried to thwart SIGTHARP at every opportunity. Incorrectly, they thought the Wall Street bankers would suddenly embrace a high moral standard and follow the rules. Wrong! Everyone should read this book, especially the politicians, in the hope that the big mistakes will not be repeated.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The personal story of the Special Investigator General for TARP (US bailout of banks, mostly). I will have to stop reading these books. I know enough to be worried but not enough to figure out if I should do anything (or if anything can be done). I think the banks had to be bailed out, but the terms could have been better and we haven't really fixed any of the problems. It's not really new that helping taxpayers gets the news items but not any real programs. It's not really new that there are multiple revolving doors between congress/staff/lobbyists/industry. If you're on the inside you get richer. If you're not, tough. Barofsky comes from a background of prosecuting fraud cases and it was interesting to see all the imaginative ways that people game the system for their own benefit (some legal and some not). Partly a result of rules based legislation written by lawyers in the pay of corporations. sigh.

[Danielle]

Saw this author on CNN and it sounds like a Must Read book.

[David Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished up Neil Barofsky's "Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street." I'm a big stickler for needing to understand the workings of the state and financial capitalism in the most rigorous and technical of terms, going beyond the fundamentally correct but ultimately vague tropes of "capitalists profit at the expense of workers and that's a bad thing." As an ex-federal prosecutor for the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York who worked on plenty of mortgage fraud cases, and most relevantly, the former Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), Barofsky does not fail to deliver on detail.

Barofsky has a great ability to convey the most elaborate of schemes behind the 2008 recession in a manner that elucidates their nefarious elements in a way non-experts can easily grasp. For instance, a considerable portion of the book is dedicated to discussion about the TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility) and the PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program), which were ostensibly designed to "unclog" banks' balance sheets by providing easy liquidity for toxic assets (e.g. subprime mortgage-backed securities) and spur consumer lending from investment institutions. As Barofsky explains, this convoluted mechanism was one of the numerous means in which banks were a) not only able to get away with not cleaning their balance sheets of these toxic assets, but b) effectively contributed to rewarding and valorizing the "too big to fail" ethos that led to Wall Street's disaster and will lead to even more in the future.

Where the most incensing parts of Barofsky's narrative emerge, however, is in his discussion of the Obama-era Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP. Really, this is at the core of the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis, and the disastrous failure of the US government in amending exorbitant or even underewater mortgage terms (that were fraudulently underwritten to begin with), letting the **mortgage servicing industry** administer these mortgage modifications, and the ultimate sunsetting of HAMP that returned mortgage interest rates to pre-program levels, spiking rates by over 20 percentage points in some cases, and forcing honest and hard-working families into foreclosure after doing everything right.

As I like to say, one of capital's most potent weapons against workers and families is to make the rules of the game as fiendishly convoluted as possible, and rely on the ignorance of policy-makers and the public to take advantage of all of us. Barofsky does a superb job of cutting through the technocratic morass, the alphabet soup of government and financial acronyms, and extracting for the reader the remorseless tactics of every actor in the financial sector and in the US government that led to this crisis.

[Deon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bailout is a riveting account of Neil's time as the Special Inspector General of the Troubled Relief Assets Program (TARP) – a $700 billion bailout fund that was eventually funneled into the pockets of Wall Street executives at the expense of main street. In excruciating detail, Neil writes about how government officials blatantly reject anti-fraud measures to serve the interests of Wall Street banks that were deemed "too-big-to-fail".

Reading this book was an extremely distressing experience. Honest homeowners and the American public were essentially betrayed by their own Treasury for years after the financial crisis. Despite Neil's repeated attempts to put sensible anti-fraud measures in place, he was mercilessly sabotaged by other government officials every step of the way. While I really admire Neil's courage and transparency in his reports to Congress and his stubborn insistence on holding Wall Street banks accountable for their irresponsible behaviour, reading this made me feel so disappointed in people – particularly the people whom we trust have our best interests at heart.

The American political system definitely needs some reworking. By allowing for aggressive lobbying, massive campaign contributions, and guarantees of huge bonuses for government officials who quit to join Wall Street, the political influence of Wall Street is dangerously huge. Without proper measures to stamp their influence, I wouldn't be surprised if American taxpayers end up taking the brunt again in the event of a second financial meltdown.

Even as a Singaporean, this was an interesting look into how the American administration works behind the scenes. The atrocities described here partially explains the anger and resentment that colour American politics today. If you're confused about the Wall Street vs Reddit stocks war over the past few days, this book will answer your questions.

#QOTD: They should be revolted by a financial system that rewards failure and protects the fortune of those who drove the system to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly do so again.