The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy by Yanis Varoufakis
I found a flaw… . a flaw in the model.
—Alan Greenspan, October 2008
It’s almost three years since the bubble burst. If understanding really does abhor a vacuum, something about why it happened ought to have been learned. Much has been written on the subject, to be sure, lots of it terrifically trenchant. Journalists like Matt Taibbi (in his superb Rolling Stone screeds) and Andrew Ross Sorkin (Too Big Too Fail) establish incontrovertibly that there was colossal greed at work on Wall Street. (The bankers, one can’t help noting, admit as much. It’s only the criminal charges they’re a little defensive about.)
But moral narratives alone will never suffice; what’s being reckoned with here, recall, is arguably the greatest systemic failure of all time. The bankers cannot have been the only ones responsible. A more circumspect explanation is to be found in what might be called the “regulatory capture” version of the moral tale, found in books Simon Johnson’s 13 Bankers or Joseph Stiglitz’s Freefall. In this version of the crisis, self-interested elected officials and the regulators they appointed are (quite rightly) seen to have stood aside for the banks.
