** spoiler alert ** This was a very well written book about TARP that was highly critical of Treasury and regulators for the role that they played in bailing out the banks, without exhibiting much concern for mortgage borrowers or taxpayers in general. The author was surprisingly complimentary of the bipartisan cooperation he experienced on Capitol Hill.

While it is a well written narrative, but it focuses too much on the personal interactions that the author had with specific people (notably Tim Geithner and others at Treasury) and not enough on the bigger picture for my tastes. I also felt that at times, he was dismissive of arguments that others made that have merit. For example, he dismisses Treasury's argument that attempting to determine what the banks did with TARP money was pointless because money is fungible. He asserts that their are ways to make such determinations, without providing much detail. At one point he mentions something about this being doable by comparing what they did with TARP money to what they did the year before, but that's a bogus solution. It would be like trying to evaluate whether the stimulus helped by comparing economic activity before the stimulus with outcomes with the stimulus. It's just not a helpful comparison. The real question is whether banks lent more with TARP money than they would have without it. That's a harder question to answer than the author gives Treasury credit for.