In their groundbreaking new book, The Bankers’ New Clothes, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, two of the world’s most prominent and respected academics in finance and economics, expose the lies propagated by those who fight so dramatically to preserve the broken status quo. Argument by argument, scare tactic by scare tactic, they take on the bankers’ arguments and shred them, one by one, exposing them as nothing more than self-serving justifications for preserving a system that serves only the banks, not the general public. And most importantly, they do so in plain English with real world examples that are familiar to anyone who has ever had a bank account, a credit card, or a mortgage. They make the complex simple, and in so doing, reveal that as taxpayers we have been on the wrong side of a decades-long con that has enriched a handful of bankers while the rest of us suffer for their excesses.

Jeff Connaughton has authored a powerful, and chilling insider’s perspective on the financial crisis and the pathetic governmental response to it. The second part of his title sums up the result and the first half explains why Wall Street always wins. Many, perhaps most Americans are likely to agree with both parts of Connaughton’s title so this book will not transform the public’s view of the issues. The public largely has this set of issues correct. Connaughton gives the readers unique access to the facts because he had a front row seat to many of the key discussions and he has the analytical abilities and expertise to explain the significance of those facts.

The country is in the grip of a great financial crisis. People face record unemployment.Wall Street executives are described as geniuses who are fully worth the exorbitant salaries and bonuses they are paid, but those salaries are coming out of money that should rightfully go to their shareholders.

It was not all that long ago that the careful study of the interaction of public policy and politics was a somewhat moribund field in political science. What little work existed was, too often, not terribly useful for those of us—citizens, activists, statesmen—interested in improving the quality of governance.