Starting in the 1980s, the United States' carefully constructed regulatory infrastructure started to decay. Exotically Unconventionally structured companies and securities escaped the regulatory system, eventually creating a shadow financial world that operated without necessary constraints. Too often, the government treated the fragile system's occasional failures as crimes to be prosecuted and not as evidence of fissures in the civil regulatory system, but simply as crimes to be prosecuted. The financial catastrophe that started in 2007 taught us something that we had known but forgotten. Financial markets that are too free will eventually devour themselves and everything around them. By the end of 2008, the destruction was so vast that the government felt compelled to step in and prop up entire financial firms and markets in an effort to limit the damage to the broader economy.

In After the Fall, Nicole Gelinas reveals how, in the face of emergency, the government has socialized nearly all risk once taken by financial institutions and private investors. As the government undertakes the rebuilding of our regulatory infrastructure, Gelinas reveals the potential nightmare of government guarantees, which distort the markets and, force private - healthy, private - good companies to compete against toxic, bad, government-protected companies. Worse, U.S. citizens will assume the ultimate risks in the financial sector, while the private sector enjoys the profits. After the Fall exposes this prescription for disaster, one that whose effects could endure beyond the immediate crisis.