Additional Praise for Zombie Banks

“Yalman Onaran’s analysis is dead-on. So is his imagery of the dead banks walking among us, stalking and killing the wobbly post-2008 recovery. Zombie Banks clearly and scarily puts together all the pieces that explain a financial world again falling apart. Onaran calls out the culpable, from Wall Street’s toady Tim Geithner to Ireland’s clueless bankers, and writes so lucidly as to render a complex mess understandable.”

—John Helyar, co-author of Barbarians at the Gate

“This book does an excellent job of pointing out the administrative and political pressures that are rampant. I like the contrast used to make the point that Iceland avoided the major errors. I’ve always recommended more capital for the banks as the best way out; so does Onaran. The only way is to announce that we will not bail out any firm at any time; that will change their attitude toward more capital. Higher capital requirement puts the risk decision on management and stockholders, where it belongs.”

—Allan Meltzer, author, A History of the Federal Reserve, and professor, Carnegie Mellon University

“Zombie Banks, like the movie Zombieland, is a fun romp—until you realize this is not fiction. Onaran effectively expands Ed Kane’s thesis from the Thrift Crisis, when only a few U.S. institutions were ‘too big to fail,’ and shows how the program of declaring the end of insolvency by merely refusing to recognize its existence has grown popular, worldwide. Of course, Onaran can’t yet tell us the end of the story, but we can surmise that the longer the trend continues the worse the fallout will be.”

—Joseph Mason, professor, Louisiana State University