The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News, my name is Doug Henwood, to keep

expectations well anchored, the usual two guests in two segments today. Gerald Epstein

will talk about the Bankers Club and how to bust it and Anna Corn Blue

will explore our cultural proclivity to live in the moment.

Bankers, and I use the term loosely, make too much money, do little useful, and periodically drive the economy into a ditch.

Though this could be read as shallow populism, it's fundamentally true and could be fleshed out without betraying

the original sentiments.

Here to provide some of that elaboration is Gerald, aka Jerry Epstein.

His new book, Busting the Bankers Club, Finance for the Rest of Us, was published last month by

the University of California Press. It's a taxonomy of the current

system and a set of suggestions on how to fight it. Jerry is a professor of

economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of its

political economy research Institute, Perry.

I should make it clear that by bankers he means not just the likes of Chase and Wells Fargo,

but also other institutions like Hedge Funds, Private Equity,

and Asset Managers like Vanguard.

Gerald Epstein.

So let's do a stylized history of the last, I don't know, 100 years or so.

Banking was pretty wild going into the 1929 crash.

Then the New Deal reforms made it boring for a few decades.

Bankers got sick of it being bored, hire some politicians

and made it fun again starting in the 1980s.

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