Author Nomi Prins is a “class traitor.” She worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, as a Lehman Brothers strategist, and as a Chase Manhattan Bank analyst. She also ran the international analytics group as a senior managing director at Bear Stearns in London, before she began writing books exposing the financial sector’s secrets and wrongdoing. But Wall Street’s loss has been the people’s gain.

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Her growing disenchantment was compounded by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which Prins called an “aha moment because I was working down on Wall Street at the time -- Goldman was very close to the World Trade Center. I was in the building that morning after the planes came by and there was smoke and nobody really knew what was going on. Was it a terrorist attack? The guys on the oil desk were making market. Not only were they doing that -- they weren’t doing that out of their own instinct necessarily -- the head of the commodities desk, one of the top guys in the division who’s now the number two guy at Goldman generally, was telling them to do that. It was really off-putting, because people were trying to figure out what was going on. It was just really strange.”

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“The public has become isolated from, and cynical about, the political process,” Prins said. “This, coupled with the fact that the big banks got away with a big, expensive scam, rampant inequality, and that most individuals are not seeing their personal finances rise in anything like the trajectory of the stock market (all Washington and mainstream media rhetoric of a recovery aside) has led people to seek the truth about the state of the economy through these various individual voices. It’s actually a good sign that people from the far left to the far right are purchasing these books and listening to the perspectives and insights of these authors, because a more informed society is a better-armed society.”

The Progressive asked Prins if she thinks that a form of socialism is the solution for the problems she details in All The Presidents’ Bankers? “Financial capitalism, which took hold in the early 1900s as I write in my book, has shown itself to be dangerous to the public welfare, particularly in the unrestrained manner in which it operates today,” she said. “Every crisis, followed by ‘remedies’ that consist of socializing the losses of banks while privatizing their gains, weakens democracy and the populations of the world. A form of socialism for the people, rather than for these institutions, that seeks to minimize this inequity and its associated risks would benefit everyone, including those at the top of the wealth chain, but on a much fairer, juster, and safer basis.”