Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves

by Andrew Ross Sorkin

To Volcker, Wall Street had grown far too complicated by offering products like collateralized debt obligations and had veered away from its core role of helping the economy through responsible lending. At a gathering of bank CEOs in late 2009, he famously chided its leaders: “Wake up, gentlemen. I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy, just one shred of information.” He added, “The most important financial innovation that I have seen the past twenty years is the automatic teller machine. That really helps people.”