The Seven Sins of Wall Street

March 17, 2014
Size, secrecy, pride, greed, impunity, complexity, and immunity from adequate regulation: these are journalist Ivry's cardinal sins of Wall Street. Ivry believes that U.S. banks have been allowed to swell into financial behemoths considered "too big to fail," entitling them to cheap money and massive government bailouts. Big banks have prospered in the wake of the Great Recession. JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo had $5.2 trillion in assets on their books at the end of 2006; in 2012 they had $7.8 trillion. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans (unemployed, underpaid, and foreclosed upon) continue to suffer. Over several chapters, Ivry effectively contrasts the fate of a single mother foreclosed out of her Memphis home with that of a Wall Street trader who maintains multiple mansions that go unoccupied. Florid reportage of events override explanations of complex financial topics, sacrificing clarity and balance along the way, such as when Ivry compares the controversy surrounding derivatives to "the plot outline for a Billy Wilder film noir." Contrary to the title, the next financial crisis is never fully explored, except in a foreboding sense of impending doom should things not change. While well-informed proponents of the Occupy Wall Street movement will likely enjoy this emotionally-charged expose, ultimately it tell only one side of the story.

February 15, 2014
A reporter for Bloomberg News, no enemy of capitalism, reads a fiduciary riot act to the bankers and hedge fund managers of the world. A bank that's too big to fail, by Ivry's account, is far too big. Yet they were responsible for the near collapse of the world financial market in 2007-2008, through a combination of "stupidity, poor oversight, and more than anything, a neighbor-versus-neighbor waging of financial warfare." In the aftermath, banks have been posting record profits. It may be that theology and economics don't mix, but the overall sin of a system so rigged is its simple unfairness. More specifically, Ivry calques the seven sins of theology onto Wall Street, finding it guilty of such things as secrecy, pride, regulatory capture--that is, when regulators identify more with the institutions they're supposed to regulate than with the society that employs them--and "a predatory greed weaponized for the war fought by the rich against the poor and middle class." Ivry's larger message is to show how these sins fuel a scheme in which risk is socialized, spread out among the taxpayers, while profit is most definitely privatized, kept out of the hands of the people who made it possible. Ivry writes with high indignation punctuated by occasional light touches ("As I tried to find the switch on my own bullshit meter, which I had on vibrate and which was now rattling my molars..."), and he has a talent for deconstructing financial jargon ("Think of derivatives as side bets made between two gamblers"). Yet his intent is utterly serious, and his book ought to become a standard text for the Occupy Wall Street and similar movements. "America needs strong banks," writes Ivry. "But banks need a strong America too." To judge by this angry book, the denizens of Wall Street are doing all they can to obstruct this--and it's high time to return the favor.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.