MIT economics prof Simon Johnson, who has shot to fame thanks to a brilliant Atlantic Monthly article a year ago (The Quiet Coup, May 2009) highlighting the political power of investment banking, has a new book out. It's called 13 Bankers and is co-authored with James Kwak.

The publisher says the authors:

“[G]ive a wide-ranging, meticulous, and bracing account of recent U.S.
financial history within the context of previous showdowns between
American democracy and Big Finance: from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew
Jackson, from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They
convincingly show why our future is imperiled by the ideology of
finance (finance is good, unregulated finance is better, unfettered
finance run amok is best) and by Wall Street’s political control of
government policy pertaining to it.”

A talk by Prof Johnson at MIT is reported in MIT News. It says Johnson was gloomy about reform prospects but did note that Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd had been reading his book. So there's some hope. Maybe we can get copies shipped quickly to this side of the Atlantic during the election campaign.