Veteran journalist John Authers is the author of a sobering book in which he traces how decades of financial innovations helped to make the recent financial meltdown inevitable.

"The Fearful Rise of Markets" also shows that none of the problems that caused the last meltdown have been resolved.

Dispassionately but clearly, he suggests reforms that might make investors and bankers behave as though the money they are managing were actually their own -- and thus dampen the risk of yet another crisis.

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