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

In the past ten years, Wall Street has changed immeasurably. The most ambitious effort to regulate it came in the form of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010—a 2,300-page law with 400 new rules intended to reduce risk in the financial system. Banks were forced out of the game of trading for themselves as a result of a controversial new rule in Dodd-Frank named for Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve. “Banks will no longer be allowed to own, invest in, or sponsor hedge funds, private equity funds, or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their customers,” President Obama said when announcing the rule.