Nomi Prins worked for Goldman Sachs prior to becoming a journalist. She is thus very familiar with the inner workings of investment banking. Despite the early publication date of the book, it contains a rounded and complete account of the financial mess and fingers the correct now familiar group of culpables who have yet to be punished for their incompetence, neglect, greed and looting. Her case against Greenspan, Geithner, Rubin and Paulson is strong. Why Hank Paulson is not behind bars for insider trading or defrauding the public can only be answered by the big campaign contributions of his parent company. It is sad that more than two years on, the United States o America is still trapped in the destructive grip of the plutocracy. ( )

Nomi Prins appears to be an activist of the Naomi Klein type but her book "It Takes a Pillage" is far more rewarding than Klein's "No Logo".

Whereas Klein fashionably follows her political line (e.g. in ignoring the fact that Chinese manufacturing has lifted 400 million+ Chinese out of poverty), Prins approaches the subject of Wall Street involvement in the credit crisis in a much more open minded way. Perhaps she is rather light on what the consequences would have been of a non-bailout, or the extent to which property speculators stoked the demand for credit, but she explains very clearly the way in which middle America was robbed (indebted) by a group of Wall Street - Washington insiders.

In admirably researched detail she shows how Wall Street found a way to make enormous profits in the first years of the new millennium by misusing free market liberal arguments to demolish the legal barrier separating commercial and investment banking (Glass Steagall Act 1933) and in 2004 gain SEC approval for an official increase in leverage from 12:1 to 30:1. The way was open for the placing of massive bets on an extended capital base linked to sub-prime mortgages with a new government guarantee should anything go wrong.

Of course it did go wrong as sub-prime mortgages defaulted and the leverage went into reverse with the nasty twist that the repeal of Glass Steagall had produced banks that were "too big to fail" and which enjoyed the newly extended guarantees.

I feel that Nomi Prins (ex Goldman Sachs managing director) is one of the few people that really understand the extent of the damage. The media certainly doesn't as they continue to talk about the TARP and its possible repayment as the end of the crisis. She shows the real facts to be that the government provided $13 trillion in federal bailouts and loans of which TARP was only $700 billion (5%) with full system wide hidden losses possibly in the region of $140 trillion.

The book finishes with a very valuable section entitled "Some Solutions" that puts forward structural legal protections to society along the lines of a modernized Glass Steagall Act and a requirement that all debt be quantifiable and in clear view (no more off-book debt) with government guarantees only applying to normal commercial banking. If investment banks speculate then they do so without a government guarantee. As she says, "People at the top could still get rich, just not as rich - and not at the cost of ravaging the general population and generations to come."

Unfortunately this is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted and the author doesn't have much to say about how middle America will pay off the debt so cynically handed to it by Wall Street and Washington. Its the potentially explosive next chapter of the story. ( )