By Neil Barofsky. Full title Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. In this bracing, page-turning account of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Neil Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush and Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In vivid behind-the-scenes detail, he reveals proof of the extreme degree to which our government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the broader public—and at the expense of effective financial reform. Free Press (2012), English, Hardcover: 288 Pages.

At the height of the 2008 financial crisis, Barofsky became the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the spending of the bailout money. From his first day on the job, his efforts to protect against fraud and to hold the big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from the Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts.

Barofsky discloses how, in serving the interests of the banks, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms and would have allowed them to game the markets and make huge profits with almost no risk and no accountability, while repeatedly fighting Barofsky’s efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG and Geithner’s decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses—including $7,700 to a kitchen worker and $7,000 to a mail room assistant—and that the Obama administration’s “TARP czar” lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay.

Neil Barofsky is currently a Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law. From December 2008 until March 2011, he served as the Special Inspector General in charge of oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Before that he was a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. This is his first book.