Predator’s Ball is really fun. Milken was the first finance topic I got obsessed with. There’s something very Hamilton about the image of a bond analyst wearing a miner’s headlamp while reading prospectuses on the bus. That said, Bruck was writing a book from a lawyer’s perspective. There were a couple good Milken-Truther books, including Payback (legal counterarguments), Highly Confident, or Sobel’s Dangerous Dreamers.

I tend to prefer a more decentralized approach to managing risk in the banking system. The fundamental problem is that we never know how socialized banking is. When times are good, it’s a free-market system, but what usually happens is that some segment right on the border of regulated and anarchic grows the fastest, and leads to systemic risk, and once that risk gets realized we socialize it.

Real-time analytics would be a barrier to entry. JPM could implement it, but the next Lending Club or SoFi might have problems. (Implementing it would be easy; getting it into a format regulators can understand will be difficult in proportion to how new and different the financial product is. So what gets subsidized is anything that looks safer than it is — we’re back to regulatory arbitrage!)