Folks, I want to pick up on something Heidi says about John Gutfreund. I agree that Gutfreund's appearance in the book is solipsistic, as if Wall Street itself begins and ends with Michael Lewis' experience of it. But Gutfruend is there to personify the transition from private partnerships where the principals in a firm"”not the shareholders"”deploy the capital, to publicly traded banks where executives in charge own only a microscopic portion of the company's stock. Be that as it may, there's a bigger issue in the separation of ownership from control on Wall Street.

What Lewis is trying to say is that harnessing shareholder dollars is the beginning of moral hazard. Even with bank employees' own net worth tied up in the bank's stock, there is an incentive...