Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In the last couple of months, I've read and reviewed another book by a former Goldman Sacks banker who also thought the Wall Street banks had gone to heck in a hand basket. In his book, "Survival Investing: How to Prosper Amid Thieving Banks and Corrupt Governments," John Talbott entitled one of the chapters "Corruption In The Banks" and another one "Only an Idiot Would Lend to a Sovereign Government." At that time I thought maybe that author was just spewing "sour grapes" over some unknown experiences in his own past. Not any more. This book by Neil Barofsky the Special Presidential Inspector General for TARP, makes it clear John Talbott's opinions of the mess corruption has made of the banking system was right on the mark. In "Bailout" Neil Brofsky, who was in a position to know the facts, documents his own 19-month tenure trying to clean up some of the messes created by the much too cozy relationships between Wall Street and government. More importantly he points out that the government is so big that its a bureaucracy within bureaucracies that can't do anything but grow and spend more money. The only real cure would be to take meat clever to the bureacracy and cut it down to a size that might actually be able to serve the citizens of America. This expose is clearly described and documented in a dozen chapters with titles such as "Fraud 101, Hank Wants to Make It Work, The Lapdog, the Watchdog and the Junkyard Dog, I Won't Lie for You, Drinking the Wall Street Kool-Aid, The worst Thing That happens, We Go Back Home, By Wall Street for Wall Street, Foaming the Runway, The Audacity of Math, The Essential $7,700 Kitchen Assistant, Treasury's Backseat Driver, Happy Endings" and an "afterword, and detailed Notes and Index section. Its easy, but maddening reading. It's a first-person memoir of the author's experiences working to help over-see the government's TARP program. Barofsky had already had some experience with how Washington works from his successful investigations of FARC drug distribution cases. He summed it up in a conversation with one of his fellow agents in Bogotá. "I'll tell you what I learned from this whole thing. I will never, ever take a job in Washington. The people down there don't care about justice or protecting the United States. It's all about bullsh*t, ego, politics, turf, and credit. I had no idea at the time how wrong I was about myself and how right I was about Washington." Senator Joseph Biden had already warned him about Washington. "Neil, you know what the biggest single hurdle is to enforcing the narcotics laws internationally?" "What, Senator?" "Not the traffickers. Not the corruption. The State Department. The United States State Department." Once he was indeeed working in Washington he found more truths. Mainly, that most politicians and bureaucrats didn't have a clue or want to. This entire book is filled with his disappointments with the United States Government. "Although the idea behind Inspector Generals was that they would be fiercely independent watchdogs. I soon learned that they were mostly just like any other government agency. As such their priorities were, in order of importance: maintaining and hopefully increasing their budget; giving the appearance of activity; and not making too many waves." Even when offering to help his new department get organized all the other departments offering to help expected to be paid for their services and paid the absolute most money they could squeeze out of their fellow government departments. Saving tax payer money wasn't one of their goals. While the author managed to provide some valuable information that saved the government more than $550 million dollars, sent several crooks to jail and pointed out many of the flaws in Dodd-Frank and other Treasury programs, he was depressed that once he left, the Treasury dismissed most of his warnings and ideas. There are so many specific details provided in this short memoir that the reader will have to actually read the book to find out more about them. One long quote in the book's afterword summed up much of what the author learned. "I now realize that the American people should lose faith in their government. They should deplore the captured politicians and regulators who took their taxpayer dollars and distributed them to the banks without insisting that hey be accountable for how the bailout money was spent. They should be revolted by the financial system that rewards failure and protects the fortunes of those who drove the system to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly do so again. They should be enraged by broken promises to Main Street and the unending protection of Wall Street." One of the more hopeful current events that encouraged the author was that both the Tea Party and some of the serious Occupy Wall Streeters see the obvious perils of the corruption that is rampant between much of Wall Street and its government regulators. There is hope for America when the public has begun to understand the dangers of such conspiracies. The government is too big and its only interested in protecting its turf, increasing its budget and covering its ass. The only real cure will be to cut away as much of the government fat as is humanly possilbe and many of the public servants that will need to do the clean-up aren't up to the job and their heart and personal career prospects preclude them from actually completing the task. This is an interesting and enlightening page-turner written in such a way to make the very complicated and often boring financial material understandable. It's also a primer on why so little gets done in the Washington, D.C. It, like the Wall Street banks, is too big to be allowed to fail.