Undue Influence : How the Wall Street Elite Puts the Financial System at Risk

Rating:
Summary: Great background for regulation/deregulation
Review: Professor Geisst has done a great job of making all of the confusion about the regulation and deregulation of Wall Street and the banks clearer. His account of the trend toward freeing the banks from the 1930's laws is very valuable because it shows the behind the secenes working of the different interested parties. The whole debate is part of the larger movement toward reinterpreting the past in a more conservative fashion and I found the book interesting for that reason alone. Reading this, I get the impression that conservatives reacted toward deregulation in the 1980s as strongly as the radicals did for regulation in the 1930s but the major difference was that the old regulations at least responded to a crisis, trying to fix it. The same cannot be said of the free market movement of the recent period. I found this book very vaulable.