The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance by Michael PerinoMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Flat narration of textbook-like, dry history is what keeps me from giving this three stars.
In title, this is about "Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance", i.e. the Pecora Commission begun on March 4, 1932, by the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency to investigate the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The fourth and final chief counsel for the investigation, Ferdinand Pecora, exposed of abusive practices in the financial industry which galvanized broad public support for stricter regulations. As a result, the U.S. Congress passed the Glass–Steagall Banking Act of 1933, and created the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) putting in place a familiar regulation landscape tested in more recent financial disasters. His exposé of the National City Bank (now Citibank) made banner headlines and caused the bank's president to resign. It is that testimony detailed here that becomes the main feature of this history. It is amazing to me how rapacious the concert was then -- shades of Enron -- and amazing how, unlike Enron, it survived and thrives even now as the consumer division of financial services multinational Citigroup, one of the Big Four banks in the United States.
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