The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It - New and Expanded Edition

A Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek Book of the Year

Why our banking system is broken--and what we must do to fix it

New bank failures have been a rude awakening for everyone who believed that the banking industry was reformed after the Global Financial Crisis--and that we’d never again have to choose between massive bailouts and financial havoc. The Bankers’ New Clothes uncovers just how little things have changed--and why banks are still so dangerous. Writing in clear language that anyone can understand, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig debunk the false and misleading claims of bankers, regulators, politicians, academics, and others who oppose effective reform, and they explain how the banking system can be made safer and healthier. Thoroughly updated for a world where bank failures have made a dramatic return, this acclaimed and important book now features a new preface and four new chapters that expose the shortcomings of current policies and reveal how the dominance of banking even presents dangers to the rule of law and democracy itself.

Anat Admati is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She has written for the New York Times and the Financial Times and has been included in Time’s 100 Most Influential People and Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. Martin Hellwig is director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn and former chair of the German Monopolies Commission and the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board.