Bankers’ New Clothes Author on Whether We Wasted a Financial Crisis

In a New York Times Sunday Magazine article, NPR’s “Planet Money” co-founder Adam Davidson talked to Anat Admati, finance professor at Stanford University and author of The Banker’s New Clothes, and Columbia professor Charles Calomiris. While these ideological opposites did not find common ground on most banking regulation, they agreed “that banks borrow too much.” That’s what happened in 2008 – banks over-borrowed and didn’t have enough capital to cover their losses when risky loans and investments went bad. As a result, the American taxpayer had to bail them out.

In The Bankers’ New Clothes, Admati argues for “a safer and healthier banking system without sacrificing any of the benefits of the system, and at essentially no cost to society.” The book makes the complex and complicated accessible to anyone interested in the 2008 financial crisis and what still must be done to avoid another crisis. This must read can be purchased on Amazon.