Broken Bargain, Kathleen Day
Broken Bargain, Kathleen Day
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Broken Bargain
Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street

Author: Kathleen Day

Narrator: Bernadette Dunne

Unabridged: 15 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/13/2019


Synopsis

A history of major financial crises—and how taxpayers have been left with the billIn the 1930s, battered and humbled by the Great Depression, the US financial sector struck a grand bargain with the federal government. Bankers gained a safety net in exchange for certain curbs on their freedom: transparency rules, record-keeping and anti-fraud measures, and fiduciary responsibilities. Despite subsequent periodic changes in these regulations, the underlying bargain played a major role in preserving the stability of the financial markets as well as the larger economy. By the free-market era of the 1980s and 90s, however, Wall Street argued that rules embodied in New Deal–era regulations to protect consumers and ultimately taxpayers were no longer needed—and government agreed.This engaging history documents the country’s financial crises, focusing on those of the 1920s, the 1980s, and the 2000s, and reveals how the two more recent crises arose from the neglect of this fundamental bargain.

About Kathleen Day

Kathleen Day worked for thirty years as a business journalist with the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today before joining the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School as a professor of financial crises in 2013. She lives in Washington, DC.

About Bernadette Dunne

Bernadette Dunne has been honored to narrate the work of some of the finest fiction and nonfiction writers of our time, including Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sandra Day O'Connor. The winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and a three-time Audie Award nominee, she has voiced countless bestsellers, including Memoirs of a Geisha, The Devil Wears Prada, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She studied at The Royal National Theater and lives in New York.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mary

If America’s banking system is viewed as a major character in our history—sometimes the hero, often the villain—then BROKEN BARGAIN is an essential biography. The book delineates the life of America’s financial sector through its financial catastrophes, complete with big personalities, intense confl......more


Quotes

“A fluent if dispiriting study of an economic system that forgives those at the top so long as those at the bottom remain willing to foot the bill.” Kirkus Reviews