Robert A. Hutchison

Writing this review in 2012, four years after the financial collapse of the summer of 2008. The author is a European financial reporter living in Switzerland. He researched the global monetary system, using requests under the FOIA, including the largely unfettered "foreign exchange markets", and the potential impact of high-volume and high speed trading. Less than 5% of the transactions bear any relationship actual business transactions or long-term capital flows.

Documents the deliberate appointment of men hostile to "regulations" by GOP administrations. For example, John Shad was appointed by Reagan/Bush as the 22d chairman of the SEC on May 6, 1981. [323] Reagan slashed the SEC budget and staff, hitting enforcement the hardest. [316-317]/

No mention of Greenspan, but does provide material on the US Treasury. And with that exception he does "name the names" of the culpable.

The world's biggest money game was first exposed by the persistence of David Edwards, a junior trader in Paris. He uncovered the evidence that Citibank cooked its books to evade taxes and controls in the early 1980's. Citibank trades $1.8 trillion in foreign currencies annually ($7.2 billion per day). In 1984 this trading earned Citibank 30% of its net income. The volume equals one half of the total international financial reserves of the US government -- and fears about gold reserves motivated the Nixon administration to take the government off the "gold standard" in 1971. [19] The federal reserve system could no longer intervene to support the dollar or influence demands. Nixon feared that "foreign speculators" would ask the US Treasury to redeem excess dollars for gold, literally seizing all of the the gold in Fort Knox. What he failed to mention was that the world's big banks, not private investors, were the biggest currency speculators.[20]. The biggest speculator of all was New York's Citibank.… (más)