A slender volume has dropped through the letter box. It's Darrell Duffie's How Big Banks Fail And What To Do About It. The author is Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford University's
Graduate School of Business and has written key texts in finance, so this is a book to take seriously. It promises to identify the specific mechanics of failure at a dealer bank, and to point to the institutional and regulatory changes needed to mitigate the risk of big failures.

All this in only 60 pages with no equations and seemingly little jargon. Even I, no expert in finance, might have a go at this one and report back. If Prof Duffie has figured out the crux of the systemic financial weakness as clearly and concisely as it seems, he'll have set a high standard for other authors to live up to. The first two pages augur well….