Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse
by the Majority and Minority Staff, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, US Senate
639 pp., available at hsgac.senate.gov
Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
by William D. Cohan
Doubleday, 658 pp., $30.50
Report of the Business Standards Committee
Goldman Sachs
63 pp., available at www.GoldmanSachs.com/BusinessStandards
Private financial firms overwhelmingly created the conditions that led to catastrophe. The risk of losses from the loans and mortgages these firms routinely bought and sold was significantly greater than regulators realized and was often hidden from investors. Wall Street bankers made personal fortunes all the while, in substantial part based on profits from selling the same subprime mortgages in repackaged securities. Yet thus far, federal agencies have launched few serious lawsuits against the major financial firms that participated in the collapse, and not a single criminal charge has been filed against anyone at a major bank.
