Academic

I just finished David Skeel's new book, The New Financial Deal, and my advice is: read this book.  Its subtitle promises "Understanding the Dodd-Frank Act and its (Unintended) Consequences," and it delivers.  Skeel is a bankruptcy expert at Penn Law, and he views Dodd-Frank through the prism of bankruptcy.  I admit that I'm still in the stage of digesting Dodd-Frank, thinking through its ramifications, and awaiting the myriad regulations that will flesh it out.   Short, crisp sentences, a bullet-pointed introduction to each chapter, and references that bounce from Churchill to baseball to the Bible make The New Financial Deal a great introduction to the mechanics of Dodd-Frank.  The book is admirably lean (clocking in at a mere 193 pages), filled with muscular prose and emphatically not written in typical legal scholarese. 

Skeel starts from the premise that bankruptcy works.  We should have relied on it more during the financial crisis of 2008, Dodd-Frank is flawed because it rejects bankruptcy principles, and that the solution is...a little more bankruptcy.  Whether or not you agree with Skeel's bankruptcy-centric view of the world, his argument functions as a plot, allowing him to relate the provisions to one another in a coherent narrative.  In the words of Robert Teitelman of HuffPo, Skeel

steps back and takes an intelligent look at Dodd-Frank in its entirety, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses and offering suggestions for improvements. Perhaps more importantly, Skeel, who constructs a deceptively complex argument that informed laymen can easily get through, provides a way of thinking about the legislation that gives it a coherence that I, frankly, thought it lacked.

Here is Kim Krawiec's favorable take.  The bottom line: enjoyable, understandable, and informative.  Who could ask for anything more?