Gonzo Wall Street

“Fascinating, frightening, and all too familiar. Perfectly documents how the old guard of lax regulation, 1960s go-go Wall Street—an era where there was more larceny per square foot than any place on earth—crashed the system, then slyly hustled a bailout from Washington. Today, there is a new Wall Street Club. Same game. Different player.” – William D. Cohan * journalist and author of The Last Tycoons, House of Cards, Money and Power, and The Price of Silence *
Gonzo Wall Street, indeed! A brilliant, historic account of financial incompetence and malfeasance. Urgent reading with critical lessons for today. – Douglas E. Schoen * author of The End of Democracy and co-author of America: Unite or Die *
“Farley tells a compelling, amazingly colorful story about the great financial battles that shaped public life in the 1930s and the financial institutions that both protect and imperil us now. Along with fresh details about familiar figures like FDR, Huey Long, and Joseph Kennedy, we meet several characters nearly lost to history who are more fascinating than any we have today.” – Jonathan Alter * bestselling author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope *
“Richard E. Farley combines several things not often found in the same author: knowledge of the financial markets, then and now; a very good understanding of how Congress operated in the 1930s—and to a great extent still does; and a knack for writing about complex subjects in an interesting way. The result is a book which enlightens and entertains on a subject which has become as relevant as it was eighty years ago.” – Barney Frank, former US Representative
“Richard Farley has written a comprehensive and entertaining account of the battles with Wall Street during the Depression that gave birth to the FDIC, the SEC, and the basic depositor and investor protections that we too often take for granted today. The conflicts and combatants chronicled in Wall Street Wars are similar in so many ways to those we fought during and after the 2008 Financial Crisis. This is required reading for a true understanding of why our financial system has come to work the way it does, and why we must be ever-vigilant to maintain these hard-fought protections.” – Shelia Bair, former US FDIC Chairperson

Richard E. Farley is an attorney in New York City. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed books Wall Street Wars: The Epic Battles with Washington that Created the Modern Financial System and Gonzo Wall Street – How the Go-Go Bankers of the 1960s Crashed the Financial System and Bamboozled Washington. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and other publications. He is the recipient of Bloomberg BNA’s Burton Award for Legal Achievement for exceptional legal writing.

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