San Antonio College Library

"The subprime mortgage crisis has been blamed on many: the Bush Administration, Bernie Madoff, the financial industry, overzealous housing developers. Yet little scrutiny has been placed on the American legal system as a whole, even though parts of that system, such as the laws that regulate high-risk lending, have been dissected to bits and pieces. In this innovative and exhaustive study, Steven A. Ramirez posits that the subprime mortgage crisis,...

Beginning in January 2009, The Payoff lays bare Washington's culture of power and plutocracy. It's the story of the twenty-month struggle by Senator Ted Kaufman and Jeff Connaughton, his chief of staff, to hold Wall Street executives accountable for securities fraud, to stop stock manipulation by high-frequency traders, and to break up too-big-to-fail megabanks. This book takes us inside their dogged crusade against institutional inertia and industry...