Beyond No-Fault Finance.

Matthew Yglesias reviews It Takes a Pillage, Fool's Gold, and Managed by the Markets:

From the beginning of the great financial panic of 2007-2008, efforts at understanding the crisis have been hampered by the likely bias of the people in the best position to know. Anyone sufficiently "inside" the financial world to understand what was happening was also inside enough to have suspect motives. That's why someone like Nomi Prins, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs turned muckraking lefty journalist, comes to seem invaluable. And this is never more so than when, as with her new book It Takes a Pillage, she's confirming the suspicions of those of us on the outside that there's something fishy and a bit fraudulent about the world of high finance.

Relative to the voices of the establishment, both in the political world and in the mainstream financial press, Prins is admirably clear and direct about the basically corrupt nature of many of the dealings between the government and the large banks. As she lays out, regulatory failures aren't something that just happened; they were made to happen by the political power and influence that high finance came to wield across party lines. The result has been to create a situation in which ties to major players in the banking world became a prerequisite for making economic policy at the highest levels.

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