Aleksa's Book Review: Shadow Banking

Alright, I'm back in my element with dusty academic tomes with royalty-free book covers. This week will be a quick dive into international banking with no specific direction, and this book is quite good at that: giving an overview of the field without too much time spent on any one point.

The core argument of the book is the Glass-Steagall and Dodd-Frank separation of banking. Specifically, this means the separation between asset-pooling organizations in the vein of banks, and those that are not so. With the separation primarily being the safe holding of funds for clients, fractional reserve lending blurs the lines even further.

The latter of these, the non-banks, are what is known as "Shadow Banking". Allowing ridiculous amounts of money to be laundered and redistributed, it's a tough nut to crack which even the academic researchers had trouble with. The book probably wasn't allowed to be as juicy as it wanted to be, but is definitely worthwhile reading on basic finance.
6/10