The Captured Republic: How Wall Street's Banking Cartel Strangled Democracy- and Set Up the Next Crash

Over the last forty years, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and a handful of equally powerful institutions have quietly captured the American republic. They began by persuading Congress to melt the regulatory guardrails erected after the Depression. They perfected a culture in which legal boundaries became negotiable and public penalties a routine cost of doing business. Each scandal-junk bonds, savings-and-loan bailouts, the Mexican peso crisis-became a stepping-stone to greater scale, deeper political donations, and tighter entanglement with the machinery of government.

The Captured Republic is the definitive chronicle of that ascent. Drawing on sealed court filings, internal audit memos, and whistle-blower testimony, it follows the banks from the first "quiet" bailout of Penn Central in 1970 to the subprime implosion of 2008 and the 2020 pandemic backstop that pumped trillions into Wall Street's balance sheets. It unpacks how LIBOR, foreign-exchange, and metals benchmarks were rigged in plain sight; how exotic derivatives migrated into taxpayer-insured banks; and why settlements now replace prosecutions even for repeat felons.

The evidence leads to a stark conclusion: these firms are no longer merely too big to fail. They are too dangerous to leave intact, too politically wired to prosecute, and too interconnected to unwind without systemic trauma. Unless structural remedies-functional Glass-Steagall walls, anti-monopoly caps, real executive liability-are enacted soon, another crisis is not just possible but inevitable, and the public will once again foot the bill for wagers it never authorized.

Combining investigative depth with clear storytelling, this book reframes high finance as a public-health crisis-an invisible toxin that corrodes democratic institutions and widens inequality long before the markets crash. It closes with a concrete, non-partisan blueprint for reclaiming economic sovereignty and restoring the rule of law.

A call to arms for citizens across the spectrum, The Captured Republic charts the concrete reforms-structural, legal, democratic-needed to reclaim the financial system before it claims us.